


the sun forgives the clouds

by cabinfever



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Hurt Shiro (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Stranded
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-07 17:51:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 37,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17965289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cabinfever/pseuds/cabinfever
Summary: Diplomatic missions aren't supposed to send the Black Lion tumbling towards an alien planet in the middle of a blizzard. They're not supposed to leave Shiro struggling to keep up. But this one does, and the storm isn't changing.So they wait.Absently, he reaches up and places his hand on Keith’s cheek. That’s how you comfort people, right?Keith’s eyes widen, and one of his hands raises to take Shiro’s by the wrist, gently guiding it away. “You’re delirious, I think,” he murmurs.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "eternally missed" by muse.

Diplomacy is not Shiro’s favorite part of being a captain.

If he could have his way, he’d be on the bridge of his ship every minute. He’d take his meals there. He’d sleep under a desk, probably, if they’d let him. The bridge has the best views of the stars, after all, and he’s spent long enough chasing them that he’s not about to give them up for anything.

But the inhabitants of this system want to see the Atlas’s captain and the paladin of the Black Lion. They’re sitting on one of the most important trade routes in this quadrant, and their alliance is the priority right now, so the Coalition agrees it’s for the best to indulge them.

It’s with a heavy heart that Shiro leaves the bridge.

“Looking good, Captain,” Iverson says, and maybe he’s teasing. Shiro sometimes has trouble figuring that out.

He can’t help but stand a little taller, though, feeling the perfect fit of the Garrison flight suit move with him. Though it’s more restrictive than his usual jacket and stripes, he likes the change of pace. He has a feeling these locals will like to see their new allies in full armor instead of Garrison colors; after all, what do stripes from one distant planet mean to anyone else? Scars might be a better way of pulling rank, but he’s not about to show those off. The Altean arm will have to be proof enough. “Thanks, Iverson. Feels good to be back in uniform.”

“Don’t get used to it. You’re a flight deck man now, Shirogane. I know you won’t give up this ship for anything.”

The thing is that Iverson’s probably right. Shiro considers flipping him off, but that’s more like something he’d do with the paladins than his coworker. So maybe not. Instead, he scoffs, “And you should remember it’s  _ my  _ ship. No joyrides.”

Iverson laughs - a belly laugh that Shiro’s come to appreciate for the music it brings to the rigor of the bridge - and turns back to his work.

With all the jokes settled, Shiro turns to leave. A strong hand falls on his shoulder, though, keeping him from moving, and Shiro lets it bring him wheeling right back around until he’s face to face with Coran. 

“Are you sure you don’t want me to join you for translation?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Shiro pats Coran on the shoulder. “You know the drill. Keep her running smoothly while I’m gone.”

“Of course, Captain!”

Oh, that reminds him. “Veronica-”

“I know,” she interrupts, grinning over her shoulder at him. “Don’t let Lance near the controls.”

She’s smart; she’ll keep him away. “He keeps telling me about how he’s going to take the Atlas for a spin,” he warns. “This helm is off limits.”

When he’s sure that his ship isn’t going to catch on fire while he’s gone, he takes his leave and heads down to the hangar.

The Black Lion is waiting in her usual spot, head down and mouth open so he can board. Next to all the other ships, and even the other lions, she’s imposing in all the ways Shiro has always loved. Her presence is more of a comfort than a threat, though. Shiro knows this for sure; after all, he knows the Black Lion down to her very quintessence, ancient and unyielding and not entirely of this universe. But still, somehow, she’s chosen to work alongside creatures as puny as them all. With Zarkon. With Shiro. With Keith.

Paladins, all.

Shiro steps into the Black Lion, moving through the entryway quickly because he knows from experience that Black gets finicky. He’s right: she closes her mouth as soon as he’s in, forbidding anyone else from attempting to board. Territorial to the end: that’s the Black Lion for sure. He chuckles a bit to himself and makes his way up towards the cockpit to find Keith.

It’s not hard; Keith’s running system checks, though how he sees past his mane of hair is anyone’s guess. Shiro adjusts the fit of his armor in the meantime; his fingers are itching to touch and to help with the controls, but this isn’t his place anymore. Restless adherence to uniform code is as close as he’s going to get to taking control of something until they get to the moon and start the negotiations, so this will have to be enough.

“Expecting a fight?” Keith asks when he deigns to look over his shoulder and acknowledge Shiro instead of the maps they’ve downloaded for this sector.

Shiro shrugs. “So are you.” He’s in the formal paladin armor instead of the Blade of Marmora uniform he’s preferred ever since the war’s end. It’s all appearances, for sure, and probably on Allura’s recommendation. These people want the captain of the Atlas and the black paladin, and that’s what they’ll get. Technically two black paladins, if they’re going to be picky about the criteria, but Shiro doubts the locals will care for nuance when all they want is to see the universe’s defenders up close and personal and show them off to half the other systems in this sector.

“You never know.”

“No wolf?”

“Nah. He’s too big to be walking around the palace on the moon. I don’t think the locals will appreciate it if he started wagging his tail and killed a guy.”

Shiro squeezes past Keith on the way to the cockpit, grinning when Keith jabs him with his elbow as he goes past. “Not good for peace? You never know.”

“Worth a try. I can call him if you want.”

“Pass, I think.” Shiro rubs at the spot where Keith elbowed him; his elbows are bony, even when they’re covered by his armor and undersuit. “We’re headed for the moon of the planet. The natives moved there from the planet a century ago once their climate shifted. We need access to their trade routes.”

Keith joins him in the cockpit and settles easily into his seat. “And we’re gonna woo them.”

“Up to the task?”

“I’m charming.” Keith grins over his shoulder at Shiro. “Didn’t you know that?”

Oh, so this part is starting early.

Ignoring the brief flutter in his chest at the sight of Keith’s smile, Shiro drawls, “Did you spend your two years in the abyss learning diplomacy?”

“Something like that.” Keith turns back around, squares his shoulders, and reaches out for the controls of the Black Lion. The screens flicker to life around them the moment he does, gleaming bright purple, and something deep in Black’s hull rumbles in a greeting. It’s like she’s purring.

Shiro smiles and places his hand on the doorway. It’s good to be back.

Black leaps out of the hangar without warning, bursting through the energy barrier with incredible speed. Shiro lurches to the side and braces himself on an instrument panel. 

“Bit shaky?” Keith teases without looking back.

“Been a while. But also, you’re showing off.”

“I’m not.” He is; the smugness in his voice has a little laugh in there too. Of course he’s enjoying messing with Shiro a little bit; it’s not often that they get the chance to hang around like they used to. This is his desert racing voice. He adopted it somewhere around the time that he started beating Shiro and using his own tricks against him. It came out in full force back when he’d made his first successful jump off their cliff, and he’s not stopped using it since. 

Shiro barely resists the urge to flick Keith’s helmet in retaliation. He really wants to, of course, but it’s probably not smart to do that when they’re jetting into space at absurd speeds. 

The Black Lion rockets away from the shining white bulk of the Atlas and through the void at incredible speed. Though she’s bulkier than the other lions and not nearly as fast, she’s still the greatest weapon this side of the galaxy, and she’s their pride and joy. That’s one thing Shiro won’t give up; he’ll never give up his love for the lion that was once his. He knows Keith won’t mind, doesn’t mind, that Shiro still lays claim to some part of the Black Lion’s quintessence. Shiro wonders if he still left some part of himself behind in that starfield, and if Keith recognizes it when he takes the controls and flies.

In the distance, the planet’s moon gleams a pleasantly dark red. It’s made of iron-rich rock, apparently, and the locals live in extensive tunnels within the cliffs there. It’s apparently a holdover from their living style on their icy planet down below, where the majority of their cities were hidden away from the open air. They’re like the Balmerans in that way; Shiro can’t wait to see what it’s like on the surface and compare the cities of the two civilizations. He can’t help but feel like he’ll prefer the Balmeras. Ever since he got his new arm with the crystal from Allura’s crown, he’s enjoyed the proximity to the living planets and their blue light.

Diplomacy, though, is about compromise, and he’s willing to give this place a chance.

In times like these, they could all use a little optimism.

_ “Atlas to Black Lion, we’re picking up a signal-” _

The radar starts beeping. Once twice thrice - over and over, and the screen lights up with new dots of light each time.

Galra fighters.

A lot of them.

Several bursts of laser fire jet right past them. Keith swerves them to the side. “Oh, fuck.”

“Wasn’t expecting this.” Shiro peers out the viewscreen. “This isn’t anywhere near a zone of influence.”

“They probably came for us.”

“That’s a bunch just to annoy us.”

“More of an inconvenience than anything.”

He’s right; Black should make short work of them. Shiro checks the time and sighs. If they’re quick about it, they should still make it to the palace on the moon on time. Being late wouldn’t make the best first impression, though he supposes tardiness might be forgiven given the fact that they were protecting the planet from Galra attacks.

Maybe they should have expected this. After all, this is a valuable trade route. The Galra could want it for themselves. Still, it’s not like them to only send fighters, with not a cruiser in sight. 

Shiro frowns. Something’s not right.

_ “Keith and Shiro, this is Coran! Shall we begin retaliation?” _

Keith shakes his head and does a loop around the swarm, narrowly avoiding a volley of laser fire. “Negative, Atlas. I don’t want you or the locals getting too close to this.”

Good plan. Shiro nods and focuses on making sure the Black Lion’s systems are picking up on all of the fighters’ signals. They’re not cloaking like they were just before the ambush, but there could be others. In an attack as unexpected and peculiar as this, he doesn’t doubt that it could be a possibility. “I think this is all of them.”

Humming a nonsense tune, Keith pulls the controls to the left. It’s enough of an acknowledgement that Shiro knows his message has been heard. He’ll pilot them through this. He’s Keith; of course he can do it.

“They’re quick,” Shiro comments. They’re doing all sorts of odd, flashy acrobatics this time around, coming to face them for a head-on shot and then darting away again. It’s frustrating; they’re like flies. The fingers of Shiro’s hands twitch, and Shiro wonders if the hand wants to follow through and swat the fighters out just as much as he does.

“How dumb are they?” Keith urges Black onwards, and in a flash of light, the wicked double blade appears between her jaws. “Hold on tight.” And he fires the thrusters, shooting through the sky, and forces their lion swiftly through the air, out of the black void and into the muted blueness of the planet’s sky.

Shiro knows this kind of flight. Keith’s chasing the breakneck speeds he used to reach when he flew the Red Lion. Black’s just too muscular and bulky to cut through space the way that Red can, but she’s still the second fastest of the lions, and just as deadly, if not more. 

Something deep in Shiro’s chest resonates with the low snarl of the Black Lion’s engines. 

This feels like battle again. This feels right.

He leans into it, staring out the viewscreen, and urges, “Let’s get them, Keith.”

Keith lets out a feral whoop and sends Black spiraling through the swarm of Galra fighters. The lion carves a path through them like they’re nothing at all. The blade in Black’s mouth slices through the hulls and leaves explosions in their wake, leaving only the sparking husks of the old empire’s drones. Every impact is accompanied by a flash of light and the dull  _ boom  _ of the explosion. 

The Black Lion purrs along to the symphony of destruction, and Shiro’s heart calls out in harmony.

In a burst of sound and flame, the Black Lion descends towards the planet’s surface. She still dances above the clouds, but the Galra pursuit is pushing them further from the void and into the realm of winds and oxygen. For once, Shiro misses the inhospitable vacuum. At least there, they’d be able to move better. Still, Keith holds his own, and he starts firing short blasts out to try to knock out the fighters. He’s starting to whittle down their numbers.

But it’s...off, somehow.

Shiro frowns.

The maneuvers are different. They’re not as aggressive as they usually are.

“They’re playing hard to get today,” Keith mutters, as if he’s hearing Shiro’s thoughts. “Won’t get off my flank.”

“I’m shocked that they actually learned something from all their past failures.”

“You and me both, Captain.” Keith urges Black into a dive. “We’ve got to lose them in the upper atmosphere.” He puts a bit of a spin on it, evading the bright laser blasts that streak past them. The ships are still chasing them. They have to go further.

The winds get louder around them, and snow starts to whip across the viewscreen as they burst through the upper cloud layer. They’re getting further and further from the moon where the meeting is to be held, but at least they’re keeping the inhabitants safe from the Galra.

Shiro keeps an eye on the radar. He knows these screens like the back of his own hand. Still, the fighters follow behind them. They scream through the sky, louder even than the wind all around them. One of them takes another shot, and Shiro winces even as Keith jerks the controls to the side.

The altimeter readings plummet.

And then one of the fighters turns sharp right and flies up and away from the Black Lion.

“What are they doing?” Keith hisses.

Slowly, steadily, the other Galra fighters abandon their pursuit. Each of them turns to the side and heads out of the atmosphere, leaving just them in their lion in the middle of the endless white abyss. The scream of the fighter engines fades out into nothing.

But they’re still falling.

“Shiro, this isn’t looking good.”

Shiro, from his spot at the entrance of the cockpit, asks, “Is something wrong?”

Keith makes a muttered attempt to reply. Maybe it’s a curse. Shiro’s not sure; he’s also not nearly as fluent in the Galra tongue as Keith is, and he’s pretty certain Kolivan or Krolia have taught Keith a word or two. Around the Blades, he’s definitely picked up more than a curse or two.

“Keith?”

Another mutter, and the Black Lion jolts and shudders, pitching to the right, before righting itself once more. Keith turns to glance at him and says, “They chased us closer towards the surface of the planet. Winds are off the charts in the lower atmosphere.”

“Think Black can handle it?”

“Black’s invincible.” Keith rolls his shoulders, cracking his neck as he does it. He readjusts his position, changing his grip on the controls. “She can handle it.”

With Keith at the controls, she certainly can. Shiro points ahead. “Think we can land in the mountains?”

“Can’t risk it. The instruments aren’t giving us the right data, and these winds are - fuck - horrible.”

So they’re heading for the ground. “Do we know anything about the planet?”

“Why would we? We were supposed to go to the moon.”

“Maybe Pidge can send us some flight paths. We need to get the Atlas on the comms.”

Keith mutters a soft affirmative and turns to the right. It’s a good idea; a lot of the Galra fighters peeled off in that direction. Maybe they can still recover from this.

Shiro lets Keith handle the steering and hails the Atlas. “Atlas, this is Captain Shirogane. Do you read us?”

No response.

Shiro hesitates; maybe they’re busy fighting off the Galra that decided to pester them. He’ll give them a second.

Another second.

There’s nothing but static.

They’re pitching further forward than usual. This is the opposite of the ascent that Shiro’s been expecting. Shiro hazards a glance at the many screens and sees more red than purple. Something’s going wrong. Another gust of wind shakes the hull of the Black Lion, and Shiro staggers to the side, fighting to keep his footing. “Keith,” he barks. This isn’t the time for dancing around with words. “Status.”

Tension pulls at Keith’s voice like a bowstring. “We’re going down.”

“Going down?” Shiro repeats. “Crashing?” Not the Black Lion. Not their lion. She’s stronger than that.

“I can’t-” Keith stops and pulls hard right. “Can’t fight this wind. It’s pulling us down to the surface.”

They just need some backup. If they can just get someone to guide them out of the storm front, they’ll be home in just a few minutes. Shiro opens up a comm line with the bridge and asks, “Atlas, do you copy?”

_ “Captain, are you-” _

The line crackles out.

“Coran?” Shiro asks.

No response.

Keith yells out in surprise and dives out of what quickly becomes a whirlwind that threatens to send the Black Lion sprawling through the air. The wind tugs at them regardless. Shiro braces himself in the doorway, trying to take some sort of solace in the fact that if anyone can fly their way out of this storm, it’s Keith. 

The line comes back to life briefly, this time with Hunk’s voice. He must be trying to get to them with Yellow. It makes sense; Yellow’s the hardiest of any of them, and if any paladin could save Black now, it would be Hunk at the controls.  _ “Keith, we can’t reach - the storm-” _

Keith swears, this time in Altean, and growls, “Shiro, hold on.”

Shiro sends his mechanical arm across the cockpit to wrap around the arm of Keith’s seat, clutching the familiar metal of the lion that had once been his. The touch sends a hum through the arm and into his mind, as recognizable as the Atlas but older and fiercer by far. He may not be the Black Lion’s paladin anymore, but he can understand the promise in her low continuous growl. She won’t let him or Keith get hurt. Not today.

Keith leans to the side, forcing Black’s controls with him, and they dive out of the way of a swiftly approaching rock face as it looms out of the sea of white. They get so close that Black skims her feet along the cliffside and pushes off, leaping back into the sky.

“There must be somewhere to land,” Shiro says. He grimaces when another sharp turn throws him into a wall; he catches himself with the strength of his connection to the arm. It’s sufficient, at least, to keep him from getting thrown around like a rag doll. “Didn’t the inhabitants of this system start off their civilization here?”

“Yeah,” Keith snaps, “and then they left and moved to their moon.”

“Wow.” Shiro takes a couple halting steps forward, trusting Black’s gravity stabilizers to ease his footing. He stares out at the swirling expanse of snow and ice and says, “Can’t imagine why.”

“Yeah, this is a regular  _ fucking  _ vacation spot.” Keith pulls back on the controls, drawing up short, and Black stops midair. He looks around. The wind outside slams against the strong outer plating of their lion, and Black shudders against the onslaught, but for now she holds strong in the center of the white vortex. Keith says, “There’s no way this wind is letting us up.”

“D’you think-” Shiro stops. It wouldn’t work. This doesn’t seem dire enough.

“What?” Keith hunches over in the chair; his fingers tighten on the controls. “I’ll take anything you can give me.”

“The wings.” He knows the wings like they’re his own. They were, maybe. Back when a body was something he only barely remembered, and he felt at home in the living steel of the Black Lion, the wings had been his. 

“Worth a shot.”

The cockpit flashes red; a few panels on the right start displaying emergency signals. 

Shiro shudders; there’s no draft in the cockpit but all he feels is the impossible chill of the void. He’s adrift without a lion, but right now he recognizes the feeling of diving into the starfields of Black’s heart. How could he not, when so much of his time in her consciousness was spent watching Keith at the controls?

He can’t feel Keith, though. 

Something’s wrong. The time isn’t right.

“I can’t do it,” Keith says, and for the first time in this whole fight, something in his voice wavers. “Shiro-”

“Don’t worry about it.” Shiro steps forward once more, edging closer to the pilot’s seat. “Keith, just focus.”

Another alarm starts blaring. Their altitude is dropping too quickly to correct. The sensors don’t know where the ground is.

It’s all going wrong.

Keith turns, eyes blazing, and orders, “Shiro, get over here!”

The wind screams out another challenge. It throws them to the side, and Shiro stumbles, but he needs to get to Keith. If he hurries, he can make it before-

“Shiro!” Keith yells again. He’s got one hand on the Black Lion’s controls and the other reaching out for Shiro as he twists in his seat, taking his eyes off the viewscreen to meet Shiro’s instead. 

In the back of his mind, the Black Lion roars-

_ Keith- _

Something else replies, tinged purple and red and brilliant gold, and it screams,  _ Shiro! _

“Watch out!” he yells, but there’s no time to take care.

The ground rushes up to meet them.

No gravity stabilizers could prepare them for this. Shiro, untethered by anything except for his connection to his arm, flies forward and past Keith, missing his outstretched fingers by millimeters. Maybe he hears Keith scream his name.

But then he hits the view screen, and it all disappears into blackness.

And all he thinks, past the agony of inertia cut short-

_ Keith. _

_ Keith. _

_ Keith. _

 

—-

 

“-ro! Shiro, come on!”

That’s too loud.

Maybe if he ignores it, the sound will go away and he can get some rest. He’s just so tired. And cold.

God, he’s cold.

Something hurts. A lot hurts. 

“Shiro, don’t do this to me. Come on, wake up. I know you can do it.”

That’s Keith. He sounds distressed.

He shouldn’t sound like that. Not for Shiro’s sake. He’s fine. He can show Keith he’s fine.

But it’s so cold.

“Shiro.” The voice is clearer this time, less distorted by sleep. It’s crisp in the cold all around them. Keith swears softly in English and then again in the rough language of the Galra. The quiet desperation of it tells Shiro  _ wake up wake up wake up. _

“I’m fine,” he rasps.

Fuck, it hurts to talk.

“Shiro,” Keith breathes. The relief in his voice is enough to let Shiro know he’s done the right thing. “Was worried you were a goner.” A hand cradles the back of his head.

This is familiar. Shiro’s used to waking up in Keith’s arms. He probably shouldn’t make a habit of it.

Shiro smiles weakly and opens his eyes as much as he can. “So little faith. I’m strong.”

“Yeah, you’re so strong.” Keith’s face swims into view. He’s grinning down at Shiro, not wearing his helmet. Despite the grin tugging at his lips, the skin around his eyes is still creased in concern. It’s sad to see that on his face; Keith should never be hurting.

Absently, he reaches up and places his hand on Keith’s cheek. That’s how you comfort people, right? 

Keith’s eyes widen, and one of his hands raises to take Shiro’s by the wrist, gently guiding it away. “You’re delirious, I think,” he murmurs.

Shiro blinks. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess.” Keith probably knows better than he does. His own mind’s starting to clear of the haze of unconsciousness, though, so he clears his throat and pulls his hand out of the warm circle of Keith’s fingers. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re fine.” Keith pauses. “Not fine, actually, Not really. I think you broke a few things.”

“Yeah, you, uh-” Shiro tries to stretch and winces. “You’re thinking correctly.”

“I wrapped up what I could, but the jumpsuits-” Keith bites his lip. “It’s hard to see the full damage.”

Shiro can certainly feel the full damage. There’s something desperately wrong with his right leg, and he’s definitely bruised all over. There’s a dangerous ache in his neck that threatens to crack, though whether it would bring relief or more pain keeps Shiro from moving it around too much. His ribs protest when he takes a deep breath in, but none of the wounds are going to immediately kill him. He’s made it through far worse than this. But now that he looks down at himself, he can see that some of the Black Lion’s emergency bandages and what he thinks is one of Keith’s old bandanas has been wrapped around the various wounds. “Thanks, Keith,” he breathes. “This helps.” He tosses his hair out of his eyes and looks around. The cockpit is dark all around them. “Bad crash?”

“Black’s out of commission. I think the temperature’s keeping her from waking up all the way. Most of the doors won’t even open.” Keith rises from his knees into a crouch, looking over his shoulder at the eerily dark panels. “It’ll take forever for her to recharge at this rate.”

Shiro nods. “Figures.”

“Figures,” Keith echoes darkly. He looks back down at Shiro. “We need to get you somewhere safe.”

“You’re right.” The Black Lion can survive a lot, but even she’s not meant to withstand the impossible chill of a wasteland without her power cores charged. “If we stay here, this thing’s gonna become a meat locker.”

Keith spreads his gloved hand on the cool metal of the cockpit floor. He closes his eyes, breathing out slowly, and goes silent. Around them, the silence takes on a thicker quality, like time has shifted to accommodate Keith’s focus. Shiro almost says something, but he holds back. If Keith’s doing what he thinks he’s doing, then it’s not his place to interrupt the bond between a lion and her paladin.

He’s seen this done before, but it’s always been from within. The half-remembered, violet-tinted memories of his time within the Black Lion come to the surface, bringing images of Keith in the pilot’s chair, begging for some sort of help.

_ Shiro. _

The ragged sound of Keith’s plea is loud enough to be more than a memory, but this Keith remains silent. Shiro shivers and waits. It’s not right to go wandering around into his past. He has to stay in the moment if they’ve got any hope of surviving this.

After a few frigid moments that draw out into icicle hours, Keith murmurs, “She’s quiet.”

It’s hard not to notice. Shiro’s intimately familiar with every hum and rumble that vibrates its way through the Black Lion’s bones. The music is as natural to hear as breathing, even now that he’s been in this new body for some time.

The silence, then, is damning.

He says, “Black’s strong. She’ll charge back up.”

“Yeah.”

Shiro raises an eyebrow and levers himself up into a sitting position with a little more difficulty than he’d prefer. “You don’t sound very confident.”

Keith sighs, sending his breath in a pale cloud billowing through the air, and he shakes his head. The movement makes the frost in his hair catch the light of Shiro’s arm. “It’s just that she usually tells me she’ll be okay.” He taps his fingers on the corrugated metal, eliciting only a dull ring from the impact. There’s no comforting growl to resonate through their bones. Just silence. Silence, and the howling threat of the wind outside.

It’s lonely.

“She’ll be okay,” Shiro says. He has to believe it. If he can come back from the dead and still be standing, then the Black Lion can make it through anything.

“Wait. Wait. Can you feel the Atlas? Maybe it can send something to the other paladins.”

Of course. The Atlas has become as familiar to him as the Black Lion once was. And she’s  _ his  _ ship. Shiro closes his eyes, retreats to the part of his mind that resonates with the crystal in his arm, and calls out to the Atlas.

Come on.

_ Come on. _

There’s nothing. He can’t find the Atlas in his heart.

“Shiro?” Keith asks. He already knows that it didn’t work.

It’s empty in his head where the quintessence connection should be. He misses his ship. Like always, he’s ended up without a connection to the stars.

At least he’s not alone this time. 

Shiro shakes his head with a sigh. “Nothing. This storm must be crazy.”

“Magic, d’you think?”

“Maybe.” After what they’ve seen over the years, it’s not impossible. “We might as well get to shelter; I can try again later.”

“Sounds good.” Keith puts his helmet back on; it lights up as it locks into his suit. Shiro mirrors him with some difficulty, feeling every pulled muscle and possible fracture when he raises his arms. He catches Keith looking and smiles. Keith doesn’t need to be concerned. There’s nothing to worry about.

Keith comes over anyway, bending down and urging Shiro’s arm up and around his shoulders. “Let’s get you standing.”

“I can stand on my own,” Shiro insists. It’s hard to shoo Keith away, though. He makes an attempt to get his feet underneath himself and gasps when agony rockets up from his right knee. 

On second thought, maybe the damage is worse than he’d originally calculated.

“Keith,” he manages to say, “I think I need - need some help.”

Even from behind his helmet’s visor, Keith’s eyes soften. “Thought so,” he says. He secures Shiro’s arm around his shoulders and places his arm on the small of Shiro’s back. “Here we go. Up.” He gets Shiro upright without too much trouble; Shiro keeps forgetting how strong Keith is. It’s that Galra strength that he inherited from his mom, surely.

Keith’s hand curls around his waist, or tries to. Shiro looks down and can’t believe how he’s never noticed how much smaller Keith is than him. Has it always been like this? He’d thought that Keith had gotten taller after his stint in the quantum abyss with his mother, but it seems like that hasn’t brought him close to Shiro’s size. 

_ Fuck. _

Refocus. The mission is the most important. Shiro grounds himself with the warmth of Keith against and around him, and he tries not to think about the agony radiating through his bones. 

“Let’s go.” Keith leads them out of the cockpit to where the lion’s mouth waits. “The exit door works, I think, but we can’t get into the cargo hold where all of our stuff is. Not like there’s much in there anyway.”

“More than what we have.”

“That’s true.” Keith presses the button to open the Black Lion’s jaws; usually, the mouth would open intuitively, but it seems their lion needs some coaxing this time.

With a creak and soft sound of hydraulic hinges going off, Black’s mouth opens up. Immediately, gale-force winds blast against their faces, plastering snowflakes against their glassy visors. Shiro raises his right arm to shield his face. 

The storm calls.

All that’s before them is white, shifting and screaming. The light of this planet’s sun comes to them in a meager, filtered way through the snow. It might as well be twilight, but still Shiro squints into the reflected brightness. It’s enough to blind them if they’re not careful, scarring their eyes into uselessness. Then they would truly be lost.

“This sucks,” Shiro says.

“You’re not wrong.” Keith tightens his grip on Shiro. “Let’s go.”

Together, they start forging a path through the snow.

There’s not much they can do to get rid of the snowdrifts in their path. Even if they could carve through the snow, the wind would push more into their path anyway. It’s incredibly deep; Shiro suspects that beneath the powdered top layer is not the ground, but hard-packed snow and ice. They won’t find any shelter beneath the snow.

There has to be something out here.

Every step rattles the fractures in his ribs. Anything more will surely force the splintered ends closer to vital muscle fibers and organs. His connective tissue can only take so much abuse before he falls apart for good. He can make it, though. He has to.

But there’s nothing out here for miles. All that he can see is a world of shifting white and silver and blue, and not a structure in sight.

It’s just so cold.

The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. 

Shiro stumbles to a halt, holding his free hand out for balance. Keith supports him the rest of the way. The two of them sway in the middle of the maelstrom. The wind howls in the same way it has been the entire time, tugging at any loose parts of their armor, but the silence beneath it has an ominous edge now.

Something’s out here with them.

“Shiro, we have to keep moving.”

“Keith,” he says, and he hopes that the storm hasn’t knocked out their communications with each other, “I think there’s another reason why the natives left this planet.”

Keith’s hand tightens around his waist. “Shiro, what-”

He doesn’t get a chance to finish his sentence.

Something bursts out of the swirling snow and bowls into Keith with such force that it rips him from Shiro’s side. Keith lets out a low yell of surprise and tumbles backwards into the snowdrift. 

“Keith!” Shiro yells, falling as well as he can into a battle stance. He aches for a weapon he can hold.

_ Power to create,  _ Allura’s voice reminds him, but what is the point of creating when something is trying to destroy Keith?

The wind whips around them, and briefly the muffled sunlight reveals, in bright relief, a striped cat-like creature that’s far larger than either of them. It rolls around with Keith in the snow, and in a flash of purple, Keith brings his bayard up in an arc. It catches the thing across the nose, and it snarls and rolls out of Keith’s grasp.

Keith leaps to his feet and reaches behind his back for his Marmora dagger. It flashes into a sword as well, and he strikes out with both blades at once. “Come on!” he yells, bracing himself for another attack. “Come and get me!”

The monster stalks in a circle around Keith, growling a feral challenge. 

“Come on,” Keith hisses again, and there’s the sound of the red paladin in his voice.

It seems the challenge of a lion is one not easily refused. The snow creature leaps at Keith with its long claws extended from massive paws, teeth bared for the attack. Shiro flinches on instinct, but there’s nothing he can do from this far.

But Keith is ready.

The shining luxite blade bursts from between the cat’s eyes, spilling red-tinted light into the formless white of the blizzard. Keith grunts, and the monster screams, and the sound of its pain echoes over and over in the static of their faulty connection. It goes limp in Keith’s grasp. 

Dead.

Keith shoves the body away and into a snow drift. He doubles over with his hands on his knees. His panting echoes across their comm line, turning into static that crackles in and out. “They’re big,” he rasps. Violet light illuminates the snowflakes around them, turning the red of his armor a cooler shade that belongs in the frigid wasteland.

Once more, all of Shiro’s instincts scream  _ run. _

Slowly, with the muted yell of Keith’s voice in his ears, he turns and meets the glowing silver eyes of a far bigger cat.

It snarls.

Shiro braces himself and opens his mouth to call for help, but all that comes out is a soft “Keith?”

That was a mistake; the creature snarls and bounds towards him the moment he makes a sound, and Shiro panics.

He’s not fast enough with his leg this messed up. He tries to sidestep so he can catch the monster by the throat, but he stumbles in the thick snow, and instead the alien cat rakes its claws down his right side. It carves three lines from his stomach and around towards his back as it flies past, slicing through his flight suit like paper.

The scream rips itself from his chest before he can quell it. It hurts - god, it  _ hurts -  _ and his blood goes flying in a spray of scarlet into the wind before beginning a slow, insistent pulse out of the wound. It pools beneath the tight fit of his suit; the heat of it is startling against his skin.

“Shiro!” Keith yells, and there’s a hysterical, panicked note in his voice this time. He intercepts the cat before it can come around for another strike, knocking it to the ground.

Shiro staggers and drops his hand to his side. He needs to keep pressure on the wound. That’s what you do, right?

A wild snarl escapes from the alien creature. Keith rolls with it in the snow; purple light spills across the swirling expanse to mingle with the darker scarlet that drips from between Shiro’s fingers. Even like this, Shiro can’t help but feel where his skin gives way beneath the pressure of his touch. He can’t take his eyes off of Keith on the ground.

Wait. There’s something he can do.

Shiro focuses on Keith instead of the pain and his liquid pulse. He raises his prosthetic arm in the air and sends it rocketing towards the monster that’s trying to claw Keith’s heart out. He wraps his fingers around the scruff of its neck and pulls with all his strength. 

With a feral yell, Keith throws the cat off of himself, aided by Shiro’s grip. The cat lands, leaps to its feet, and goes bounding off into the snow. Its stripes mask the moving lines of its form, and it’s quickly lost. Shiro sags, defeated. Neither of them has a ranged weapon to kill that thing. His aim would certainly be worthless at this point anyway.  
Keith spits out another Galra curse and sheathes both of his blades; the black bayard dissolves into light. The word is fitting right now; there are no human sounds that quite come close to expressing the frustration they’re both stewing in right now. “Are you hurt?” he growls at last, voice far rougher than usual.

“Not badly.” He hasn’t been slashed like this since the arena. 

“Shiro, the snow…” Keith trails off.

“We need to keep moving,” he grits out. “Come on, Keith.” He starts moving without another word, heading away from the footprints they’d left in the snow on their way here. The sooner they get out of here, the lower the chances that Keith will see how much blood there is in the snow.

And if they stick around, the cat could come back with the rest of its pack.

“You’re-”

“Fine.” Shiro lets out a shaking breath. “I’m fine.”

Keith forges through the snow at an absurd rate, leaping through the depressions left by their predators’ bodies. He reaches Shiro’s metal arm first and catches it by the wrist. His hand’s too small to wrap all the way around its circumference, but the firmness of his grip is palpable even through synthetic nerves. Shiro tries to focus on that instead of the pain. He lets it anchor him. This is fine. This is fine.

“Let me help you, Shiro,” Keith says, absurdly soft. His voice cuts through the wind, fed directly into Shiro’s ears by the comm link.

Shiro nods and doesn’t bother using his voice. If he did, it would probably come out as a groan anyway. He lets Keith lead him on ahead.

It’s a good system that they start using. Keith, anchored by his grip on Shiro’s metal arm, creates the path that Shiro can step in. It helps a lot more than Shiro cares to admit, which bodes poorly for how bad he’s actually feeling.

“Wait,” Keith says after a time, holding up a hand.

“Please tell me your sensors are picking something up.” His own are too occupied with reminding him that his suit is breached, that the conditions are dangerously cold, and that he’s bleeding.

It’s a lot to juggle, in his defense.

“They are. A structure.” Keith pauses another moment. “No heat signatures.”

“Let’s just hope it’s unlocked.”

“We have ways around that.” Keith forges forward again, then looks back at Shiro. For a moment, the swirling snow parts in the wind, revealing the concerned crease of his brows. “Can you make it?”

Shiro grimaces. He mutters, “With some help, yeah.” He’ll be slowing Keith down.

Keith returns to his side at once, though, and carefully bends to allow Shiro’s arm to sling over his shoulders. Shiro gladly accepts the support and lets Keith be his legs. Their combined shuffling through the snow is far slower than Shiro would like, but it works.

“This place - it’s above ground?”

“Yeah. Weird, right? I thought most of their buildings were-”

“Underground, yeah.” Shiro tries to breathe. Each attempt hurts, so he makes the breaths shallow. Keith tenses when the rhythm changes, but he urges Shiro on. Maybe he’s moving them a little faster than he had been. It’s hard to tell.

How long have they been out here?

With each step, pain makes its way through his body in a shock wave of impact. It radiates up through his leg and into the claw marks, then up to rattle his ribs and the throbbing, aching heaviness in his head. If he has a concussion, this’ll only get worse. It’s the last thing they need right now.

“Not much further.”

He lets Keith’s voice echo around in his head.  _ Not much further. _

Good. He’s not sure how much more of this he can take.

But Keith wouldn’t lie to him. Sure enough, the vague dark shape of a low-slung building swims out of the white void of the blizzard. Keith urges them onwards, and Shiro tries his best to pick up the pace. They can make it; he won’t be the one to slow them down.

But they could be prey right now.

Maybe he hears a growl behind them. Maybe it’s just his fear. But he tenses, and even that is enough to make him cry out in pain, and Keith moves them a little faster. They’re almost at the door. They’ll make it.

Was that another growl?

Keith summons his bayard with his free hand and slams it down on the latch to the door from afar. The blunt force, delivered with Galra strength, makes whatever mechanism that hides within the door give way, and the door creaks open. “In here!” Keith orders, and he drags Shiro the rest of the way into the building.

After the brightness of the snowstorm, this place is pitch dark. Shiro stumbles inside, stifling gasps, and waits until Keith has slammed and latched the door behind them. It should hopefully keep out the monsters that are hunting them out there. They’ve made a choice now: for better or for worse, they’re stuck here.

Keith motions to him to stay just inside the doorway; Shiro takes the cue gladly, sagging against the door and trying to catch his breath. Concern flashes in Keith’s eyes from behind his helmet’s visor, but he doesn’t say a word. He takes out his Marmora blade again and lets it flash dull purple and expand to its awakened form; the transformation makes the whites of his worried violet eyes gleam faintly yellow.

Shiro focuses on keeping his breathing even.

The yellow means Keith’s fine; the light of his luxite blade glows as brightly as it ever has. That, at least, brings him some relief. It means that only one of them is incapacitated, and that Keith’s not hurting. Not badly, at least; Shiro doesn’t even think he can see a scratch on him, but he knows from experience that the paladin armor hides a lot. He’d certainly hid his fair share of injuries during his time as the black paladin.

The quick motion of Keith’s hand in the  _ keep quiet  _ signal drags him back into the moment. Shiro itches to follow  him, but then his stomach wound pulses with angry heat again and he doubles over with a barely muted gasp. Before him, Keith hesitates, and his free hand reaches out to touch, but he hangs back and twirls the luxite blade instead.

_ The mission,  _ Shiro internally reminds him, as if Keith will possibly hear.  _ Mission first. Keep yourself safe. _

Keith doesn’t need to worry about him.

He’s survived worse than this.

He’s also died from wounds like this, but he tries not to think about that. 

Though he narrows his eyes at Shiro and lingers for another moment, Keith seems to remember his Blade of Marmora training and backs away. 

He’s prioritizing the mission. Good. 

The shadows swallow Keith up, and in a moment even the blue lights of his paladin armor disappear into the darkness. He must have gone into the other room. Shiro waits and keeps as still as possible. He’s all too aware of his blood rushing in his ears and the palpable pulse of it at his side. The growing wetness beneath his suit has slowed, and he’s not lightheaded, so it’s not fatal. Still, it hurts, and when he breathes in too deeply, his vision explodes with white at the same time that pain jolts through him. Shiro bites his lip to keep from making a sound, squeezing his eyes shut until tears grow at the edges of his eyelids. 

He won’t jeopardize their lives. He can’t.

Still, Keith is silent. The building makes no sound, letting in only the muffled roar of the storm outside.

Keith’s quiet enough to kill without making a sound; the only people who doubt that are fools and dead men. He takes solace in that fact; if someone or something were trying to kill him, there’d surely be signs of a struggle.

But still, he worries, because it’s Keith.

His fears aren’t confirmed this time. Maybe the universe has decided to give him a break just this once. Seeing Keith emerge into the light again is the best thing that’s happened since the crash.

“It’s clear.” Keith comes back, letting his sword flash down into a dagger once more. “I think this was a station or something. Outpost, maybe. There’s a bed in the next room.”

“Just one?”

“It’s all we need.” Keith ducks beneath Shiro’s arm again. “Let’s go.”

With their suits and Shiro’s arm as light sources, the two of them limp their way towards what turns out to be an adjacent room. This isn’t a large building by any means; there only seems to be the main room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. It’s definitely a research or guard outpost. Or it was, before it was abandoned. The entire place is cryptlike in more ways than one. 

On solid ground, it’s easier to feel the full effect of how he’s limping. The impact of his feet on the metal floor aggravates the sprain and most of the fractures. This is a bad situation for sure. 

Shiro grimaces and keeps walking. That’s all he can do.

It’ll have to be enough.

Keith leads him into the bedroom, murmuring quiet encouragements the whole time. From anyone else, the words would just be platitudes, and Shiro would chase them off for being overly patronizing. Right now, though, the litany keeps his feet moving, and he lets Keith’s voice set the cadence of their voyage.

Just a bit further. 

He needs to rest.

“Lie down.”

“I’m fine.” He’s not.

“Get on the bed, Shiro,” Keith orders.

Shiro sits down.

Keith kneels down on the floor and takes his helmet off, tossing it to the side carelessly. His hair’s plastered to his face with sweat despite the chill in the air. “We need to take care of that wound. Let me see you.”

In any other situation, Shiro might have blushed to hear those words from Keith’s lips. God knows that he’s been hoping to hear something like that, trailed with a drawled  _ Shiro  _ that would send him shivering. Because he can never say no to Keith.

But they’re stranded, and Keith is the leader of Voltron, and he’s just trying to do his job. Taking care of the assets.

Shiro nods. “The suit,” he mutters, shrugging helplessly. “The armor - I can’t reach.” Not without more pain than this is worth. 

“Yeah. Sure.” Keith surges up from his knees and perches on the edge of the bed beside Shiro, reaching around behind his back to release the fastenings and seal on the suit. These Garrison suits are made to keep out the vacuum of space and the chill of the void, sure, but they were never made to stop slashes or protect them from the persistent cold of this world. Already, Shiro shivers, and his teeth chatter audibly against each other. Keith makes a soft noise of sympathy and starts detaching the small pieces of armor on Shiro’s chest and back. He sets them aside on the mattress.

“It’s not bad.” It’s only sort of a lie. It’s not life threatening, at least. He knows life threatening, and he knows how quickly his handlers used to scramble to patch up their Champion. He remembers the pain of a wound that can kill him, and this isn’t it. It’s enough to be a horrible inconvenience, and a miserably painful one at that. It’ll be hard to move without aggravating it.

Keith frowns up at him. “Don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not.”

“Our definitions are different. That’s a bad wound.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Shiro-”

“It’s fine.” He grits his teeth and continues shrugging out of the suit. It would be easier to cut himself out of it, but then he wouldn’t have anything to wear. This’ll have to do, and he’ll have to deal with the injury. He’s had worse.

He’s had worse.

The thing is, though, that he’d usually get patched up quickly anyway. There aren’t any medical supplies on this frigid planet that’ll come close to getting him back into working condition. 

Slowly but surely, the suit peels from his skin until it’s gathered at his waist. The cold air hits his bare skin and stays there, congealing on him like a second set of armor. It bites at him more than it numbs him, and Shiro shivers against his will.

Keith sucks in a sharp breath.

Shiro sighs. “Is it that bad?”

“Shiro…”

So it’s bad.

He looks down.

It’s bad.

“How,” Keith asks, voice tighter than a steel cable, “did you not tell me it was this bad?”

“I didn’t think-” A lie. They both know it.

“Don’t bother.” Keith rips his gloves off, baring his pale skin to the cold air. “We just need to get to work.” The tenseness is still in his voice, though. Shiro’s not sure if that’s what fury sounds like from him, or if it’s something else.

It’s worse like this. Keith’s frustration makes it worse.

The first touch is like ice, but the firebrand of pain melts the shock of it away. Shiro hisses, and Keith hesitates, but Shiro shakes his head and sets his jaw. The sooner they get this over with, the better.

It’s just a gentle probe at first; Keith’s assessing the damage like any good soldier. The blood still seeps from the wound and onto his fingers. Absently, Shiro internally laments that his blood will be caked under Keith’s nails for days. Maybe he should apologize. 

“Your hands are shaking,” he says instead.

Keith’s hands clench into fists, drawing back from Shiro’s skin. “It’s cold,” he mumbles. “Sorry.”

“No. No, you’re good.” Shiro cautiously takes one of Keith’s hands in his and hopes it might help a little bit. “I don’t know if-”

“It’s fine.” Keith extricates his hand from Shiro’s grip. “You need work. Come on. The sooner we bandage you up, the sooner we can put you back in your suit.” Keith breathes out, and even that brief burst of warmth is enough to make the rest of Shiro’s skin break out in goosebumps. “And then we can work on getting out of here. Didn’t they say that blizzards on this planet last for days?”

“Weeks,” Shiro corrects. “Or months, if we’re really lucky.”

“Shiro.”

“And I’m not the gambling type, but hey-”

Keith snaps, “Shiro, that’s not helping.”

“I’m just feeling lucky, is all.” Shiro glances sidelong at Keith, finding the tension that’s tugging the corners of his lips downwards, and says, “Just trying to make light of it. It’s a bad situation. I know that.”

“Yeah, you’re telling me.” Keith’s eyes flicker down to where Shiro’s holding his side. “Look at you.”

This again? Shiro insists, “I’m fine, Keith. I promise.”

“Sorry, Shiro, but it’s hard to believe you when I can see you bleeding.”

“I’m not bleeding.” He looks down. He’s bleeding. “Much.”

Keith scowls. “You’re a horrible liar. Stay here.”

“Can’t do much else.”

Keith shakes his head and stands up. He heads into the adjacent bathroom, and a tinny clattering follows soon after. Keith curses softly again, and there’s more rustling, and then he calls, “There’s a bunch of medkits. This was definitely an outpost. Maybe for their military or something to stay?”

“Maybe,” Shiro replies. He looks down at himself and pokes at the skin around one of the gashes, wincing when it provokes another trickle of blood and burst of pain. “At least they left some for us.”

With a soft murmur of agreement, Keith re-emerges with several nondescript gray boxes in his arms. He dumps them at the side of the bed with an unceremonious clatter and pries one open, settling back down at Shiro’s side. “We’re lucky this place has a few more medkits. They didn’t really clear it out when they left this place.” Keith pauses for a moment. “There should be enough to last for at least a couple weeks, if we stay conservative with the supplies.” He eyes Shiro’s wound and continues dubiously, “But hopefully we won’t need them for that long.”

“Hopefully.”

Keith’s lips flatten into a thin line. He’s displeased for sure. “There’s not much I can do to clean it,” he says. We don’t have much cloth hanging around.”

“It’ll be fine.” Maybe they’ll find something later.

“I just want to get you bound up. Can I-“ Keith holds up a roll of thick-looking bandages. “Can I?”

Maybe they’ll warm him up. He’s shivering in the cold, and he’d rather have his suit. “Be my guest.” 

Keith sets to work with an initial few loops of the bandage around Shiro’s torso. Shiro contorts as well as he can manage to make Keith’s job easier, but Keith just scolds him. “Allura would know what to do,” he mutters, glancing up to check Shiro’s reaction to the tightness of the bandage. “Or at least she’d put you in a pod.”

Shiro tries to not let the pain make him tense up. He knows they can both admit that they’ve been getting complacent over the years, having such quick access to healing technology that far surpasses Earth’s. He tries, “You’re doing a good job, Keith.”

“I’ll make this quick,” Keith promises.

That’s fine. He can wait. He’s good at that.

He stares at the wall and lets his eyes focus on the gibberish script of this abandoned civilization. It’s a more elegant set of loops and twists than anything on Earth, and he sets about tracing the patterns that must form words of some sort.

Distantly, he can feel Keith wrapping the wounds and clumsily setting the bones so they’ll heal in alignment again, but the pain comes to him from behind a haze. This sort of thing is familiar. He can handle this. There are plenty of things he’s blocked out from his time as the Champion, but the quiet place in his head has stayed for better or for worse. For once, he welcomes it and focuses on the writing on the wall.

Just the words.

Maybe they told a nice story once.

“Shiro.”

He blinks. “What?”

Keith studies him for a moment. His brows come together in a little expression of consternation. “It’s done, I think.”

“Oh. Is it?” Shiro looks down at himself. And it’s true: Keith has wrapped his lower torso in the thick bandages with the rough ability of any field soldier, and somewhere along the way he must have coaxed Shiro into shedding the suit from his legs as well, because the bad knee has been bound. The wrappings are stark white against his cold-reddened skin, the fresh scarlet blood, and the old crisscross of scars across his whole body. Shiro blinks down at it, and he loathes what this body has endured. But he manages, “Thank you.” Keith did a good job. Of course he did.

“It’s okay? You feel okay?”

“Better.” It’s not a lie. He blinks the haze from his eyes and meets Keith’s eyes. “A bit cold, though.” Stripped down mostly to his underwear with his flight suit around his ankles, he’s bare in the frigid air of this quiet sanctuary. “Could you-?”

“Yeah. Yeah - of course.” Keith bends and starts tugging Shiro’s body suit back up and over his legs, carefully guiding it up past Shiro’s bad knee. “Let me know if it hurts, yeah?”

It does hurt. The whole time, it hurts. Shiro bites his lip and smiles through it, though, and he lets Keith help him get dressed again. The suit doesn’t do much to keep him warm, but at least it keeps the bite of the cold from hitting his skin directly.

“Well,” Keith says when they’re done, wiping his bloodied fingers off on the mattress beside Shiro, “let’s see about getting the lights on in here, yeah?”

As it turns out, Keith can’t read the language either.

He only admits it after several minutes spent staring intently at the control panel in the main room for the internal systems of the building. With every passing moment, he seems more and more irritated. “It’s not Altean or Galran.” Keith taps at it with a particularly fierce rhythm; it clinks with a little more aggression than usual. Maybe he’s letting his fingertips get a little more clawed in his frustration.

Shiro eyes Keith’s hands at the control panel. The ferocity in his movements is undeniable. He swallows and says, “Keith. We can work around it.”

“I don’t know why I even thought it would be in a language we know,” Keith continues irritably. “I hate this stupid abandoned hell planet.” 

There’s no argument that Shiro has with that. This planet is horrible.

“Well,” he says, because if optimism is going to fail them, they might as well be practical, “let’s try to get a fire going, then. I think I saw some stuff that could probably burn long-term if we’re smart about it.” He extends a hand out to Keith. “Can you help me up?”

Keith sighs and takes his hand. “Are you sure?”

“Let me help, Keith.”

“Shiro, don’t strain yourself.”

“I’m fine,” Shiro insists. Despite what every bone in his body is telling him to do, he’ll be damned if he doesn’t do his part. He gets himself up most of the way, but Keith makes a displeased noise and helps him fully to his feet. He puts his hand lightly on Shiro’s stomach and asks if the wound is okay, and Shiro does his best to assure him it’s fine once his voice makes its way past the curious fluttering discomfort in his chest.

The inhabitants of this building seem to have stockpiled flammable material for exactly this purpose. It looks like wood, but Keith suggests that it might be silicone based instead of carbon based. Neither of them know enough about chemistry to dispute it, though. Regardless, there’s enough there that should last for at least a week or two. Longer, if they’re smart with how they ration it. Maybe they can make do with just a small flame if they stay close enough. 

Keith carries the heavier things, but Shiro helps when he can. The prosthetic arm is strong enough to lift the flammable almost-wood, but in the cold, it doesn’t function as well as it should. Shiro brings it closer to himself so he can cradle it in his real hand. The blue glow at the end of the arm flickers slightly. It fades out, briefly welcoming darkness instead of function, before regaining its gentle glow. With each fluctuation, Shiro’s head aches with the strain of maintaining the connection. Of course.

Keith notices the movement. “Arm acting up?”

“It’s too cold.” Shiro frowns. “I don’t know if it’ll lose charge.”

“It’s not hurting you, is it?”

“No.” It’s not really a lie. He can deal with a headache; the crash gave him enough of one already. He redirects his attention to the fire, or at least the lack thereof. “Wish I had my old arm, though,” he mutters. “Could light this up in a heartbeat.”

Keith shakes his head. “We’ll make it work. We don’t need that thing.”

“I’m just saying.”

“And I’m just saying.” Keith levels a hard, unwavering stare at him. Even in the dim, muted light of this shelter, the angular scar on his cheek stands out in stark relief.

Shiro bows his head, breaking the stare.

That just reminds him of all of the other things that arm had been able to do, and he falls silent. It’s hard to talk over the memory of his clone’s screams, and the recollection of how the arm had burned the remnants of his old limb away to make room for the weapon meant to kill the red paladin. And then that just leads to the searing scent of him burning through Keith’s skin, and then the blade cutting it off, reminding him that Keith told him-

He clears his throat. “You’re right. We’re better off without it.”

_ Shiro, please- _

“Good.” The version of Keith crouching before him is already scarred, and his voice isn’t nearly as desperate. “We can figure this out. Something here has got to be able to light stuff on fire.”

“Really makes you miss Red, huh?”

“Yeah,” Keith huffs, and his breath goes billowing into the air. It’s nothing like Red’s fire breath, though maybe it does make him look a little fiercer. The bright blue light of their uniforms and Shiro’s arm certainly do well to illuminate it into a cloud of little crystals. At least something here can find the beauty in their situation. “We can make this work. We’re paladins, right?” 

Shiro snorts. “I feel like there’s a joke in there somewhere. How many black paladins does it take to light a fire?”

Keith deadpans, “Ha.” Then, more pensively, “Scoot back a bit. I’m gonna try something.” He takes out his Marmora blade and one of the loose pieces of scrap that litter the floor of this shack. 

“That’s not gonna-”

“You’re a pessimist.”

“That’s you, Keith.”

Keith shoots him a sour look that reminds Shiro of their earlier paladin days. It’s a Keith expression through and through, and Shiro welcomes its return. He doesn’t give Shiro an answer, though, and he crouches inches from the kindling, holding the blade in one hand and the scrap metal in the other. Resolutely, with his brows furrowed together, he strikes the dagger against the raw steel. A few sparks shower up every few attempts, and each time Shiro’s heart stutters and stops in hope, but each time the chance of flame disappears.

It takes a few tries, and Shiro’s not sure that the string of expletives coming from Keith’s mouth is helping, but the spark from the clashing metal eventually falls onto the kindling and glows faintly red. Keith sucks in his breath, cutting off his litany of abuse in the fire’s general direction, and drops to the ground, ending up eye level with the glowing kindling. His eyes are the wide sort that Shiro’s used to seeing in cats whose attention has been caught by passing prey, and as he focuses on the fire and blows to stoke the flames.

_ Come on,  _ Shiro begs anything that might be listening. The Black Lion, anyone.  _ Can we just have this one thing? _

The embers flicker, glow, and burn brighter, and then their scarlet warmth spreads to the rest of the kindling.

“Oh,” Keith breathes, and he feeds some smaller debris into the fledgling flame. “Shiro, hand me that thing behind you.” It’s some old fabric, probably. Shiro’s not quite sure, but he passes it into Keith’s waiting hand, and with that contribution, the flame starts burning in earnest.

They did it.

“Amazing!” he exclaims, halfway to laughing.

Keith grins back at him, and though he’s not nearly as outwardly excited as Shiro, his pride is evident. 

As well it should. Shiro puts his hand on Keith’s shoulder and says, “This was all you, Keith.”

“Shiro, c’mon.”

He’s brushing it off. Shiro won’t let him. “I mean it,” he insists. “Look at what you did.” And he points at the fire, and Keith’s lips twitch into a larger smile.

Good.

So they have fire. That gives them a fighting chance.

They’ve been through worse. They can do this.

 

\---

 

The first night is cold.

Everything is cold, but trying to calm down and get some sleep is made infinitely harder when Shiro is actively suppressing his shivering. Keith found some old blankets in a box across the bedroom, and he’s given three out of four of them to Shiro, smothering him with threadbare fabric. They do help, of course, but Shiro still curls in on himself as much as he can. The smaller he is, the smaller the surface area that can release heat. Right? That seems like it makes sense.

Keith sleeps on the floor.

Shiro does try to argue. He does. But Keith’s stubbornness is basically one of his greatest strengths, and he refuses to impose on Shiro when he’s wounded. 

“You’ll freeze down there.”

“One night won’t kill me.”

“Tomorrow night you’ll come up?”

“Tomorrow night we won’t be here, if we’re lucky.” Keith blinks up at him. “Get some rest.”

Shiro wants to order him up here. He could pull rank if he really wants to, but that has always felt weird where Keith is concerned. All this time, he’s always outranked Keith, but it’s never felt like that. Shiro’s not sure he could ever talk to Keith as just another subordinate. They’re a team - always have been, always will be. That’s how they got into this mess in the first place.

Instead, he just says, “I hope you’re sure.”

There’s a pause. Keith says, “I am.” The finality invites no argument.

Uncomfortably, Shiro shifts and tries to settle down on the mattress. It’s frigid and hard, frozen solid by years of disuse. It’s better than being wet, Shiro supposes, but not by much. The blankets don’t do a lot to block out the chill of the air all around them, and he knows for sure that Keith is faring far worse with only one blanket on a metal floor. He bites his tongue around an order.

“Good night, Keith,” he says to break the silence.

Keith replies immediately - checking in like he would to any paladin - and says, “Good night, Shiro.”

Shiro falls asleep from exhaustion more than relaxation, and his dreams are white as far as the eye can see.

 

—-

 

Keith heads out to try to open up the doors of the Black Lion once every few hours. He insists that the cold won’t keep their lion down for too long; Shiro desperately wants to believe him, but every time Keith returns he’s out of breath and empty handed. They’re lucky that he hasn’t come back missing any pieces of himself. A few times, he’s nursing a bruise or too, but the paladin armor deflects far more blows than the Garrison flight suit. After all, the Garrison suit wasn’t built with alien fights in mind. Shiro’s thankful that at least Keith gets to remain protected by the lions and how they chose him.

But he does miss his own armor.

Each time that Keith comes back covered in snow and with the same grim disappointment on his face, Shiro’s heart sinks just a little bit more. 

“Tomorrow, maybe?” Shiro tries.

Keith nods, staring off at something in the middle distance while the fire melts the snow from his armor. “Tomorrow,” he echoes even as he frowns.

It doesn’t seem like he believes it.

He shakes his head, muttering something unintelligible under his breath, and then studies Shiro. He purses his lips into a little expression of consideration, then asks, “How’s that thing treating you?”

“This?” The wound, of course. As if it’d be anything else. “It’s fine.”

“Hurts?”

“Like it always does.”

Keith’s frown deepens. “That’s not good.”

“D’you think fire would help?” Shiro looks down at himself. “Do we cauterize it?” When was the last time people cauterized wounds with fire on Earth? Shiro’s pretty sure it was something to help stave off infection. Or something.

“That’s not really wise.” Keith shakes his head and, with an air of finality, declares, “I’m not letting you get fire anywhere near your skin.”

Shiro’s about to argue that the arena already let him feel what that’s like, and that he can handle it, but decides against it.

Later that night, when he’s brought Shiro back to the bed in the other room, Keith says, “Let me at least change the bandages.”

It’s going to hurt, and they both know it. Might as well get it over with. Shiro sighs. “Help me out of the suit.”

He angles himself on the bed so Keith can get behind him, and Keith settles in, fiddling with the fastenings on the suit so that Shiro can more easily shrug out of the suit. Thankfully, his ribs aren’t aching nearly as much as they have been recently, so the pain of removal isn’t too bad. Still, he winces, and Keith murmurs a soft apology in his ear. 

Shiro waves him off weakly. It’s not Keith’s fault. He was only ever doing his job.

God, they should never have agreed to send both the captain and black paladin into dangerous territory without backup. Shiro hangs his head, staring down at Keith’s hands as they unwrap the bandages around his torso and reveal the worst of the damage. There’s bruising all over his skin as well, black and blue and purple all along his ribcage, and he’s sure his legs are a similar mess. In comparison, Keith’s slim hands stand out in stark contrast, pale against the mess of scars old and new. There aren’t any claws today, so maybe he’s calmed down about their situation a bit. Shiro can only hope; there’s no use in panicking or raging against the world. They’re stuck here.

“Still bleeding,” Keith murmurs. His hands still, hovering just above the wound. 

Try as he might, Shiro can’t hold in his cough, and the force of it sends more blood oozing from the wound. The flow is near-black, sluggish and lazy, but the pain rockets through his nerves so swiftly that it knocks the remaining breath out of him. It rips itself from his chest in a low, drawn-out whine. 

“Breathe,” Keith urges softly. “Breathe.”

Shiro squeezes his eyes shut and focuses on taking in a single deep breath. The inhale takes forever, and he has to struggle not to cry out at the agony of pain like ice crystals have bloomed in his lungs. Exhale. Exhale. It shakes and nearly turns into a cough, but still he tries. “I’m fine,” he manages. His throat is too dry for want of water and too wet for want of healing. He’s getting used to the taste of blood in his mouth. This is the new normal.

“You’re fine,” Keith agrees. “You’re fine.”

When he says it like that, Shiro wants nothing more than to believe him.

“I’m fine,” he repeats, and this time he tries to mean it.

 

* * *

 

The second night, Shiro’s alone in bed again.

“Stay comfortable,” Keith says. “I want you to be the best you can be.”

“Without you?” Shiro teases. “Impossible.” Keith’s his constant in all of this. Besides, he’s also the second warmest heat source in here, second only to an open flame. 

Keith shakes his head with a soft laugh. “Just get some sleep, Shiro.”

“Keith-”

“Please?”

God, but Shiro can’t say no to Keith. And he’s so tired. The cold has stolen so much of the fight away from him. 

“Tomorrow night, then,” he says.

Keith nods. “Tomorrow night.”

He’s lying, but Shiro’s in too much pain to fight him on it. He turns towards the wall and curls up on his side instead, trying to ignore the burning heat of the claw marks scored into his flesh. 

The night is cold, and his dreams are frigid.

 

* * *

 

During the day, he rests. Keith comes and goes, and Shiro can’t do much to stop him. All he can do is wait and hope. Wait and hope. Wait and-

He gets hit in the face with a blast of cold air.

Shiro looks up, startled. He must have dozed off while he’s been sitting here.

It’s just Keith, stomping snow from his boots and closing the door behind himself. “Hey, Shiro.”

He smiles. “Keith.” Relief warms him even more for a moment. Every time Keith comes back safe from the snowbound wasteland of predators and pain, he considers them lucky. Each time, he’s sure their luck is bound to run out soon.

“Comfortable?”

“As much as I can be.” It’s the place in the main room that escapes the worst of the gust of wind that rushes in whenever the door opens. Shiro likes to sit there during the day; it’s less sad out here than in the barren bedroom. He feels less useless than he would if he were bedridden completely. At least tending to the fire makes him feel like he’s contributing to the effort. “Any sign of a signal?”

“Nope. Just more of those things.” Keith takes his helmet off, swiping the snow from it and setting it down on the little table. He drops to the floor, folding up cross-legged and scowling at the dirty corrugated metal floor. “They hunt in packs, I think. It’ll be hard to keep making trips to Black if they keep this up. They’ve definitely got our scent.”

Shiro leans his head back against the wall, letting his eyes slip shut. “Just our luck.”

Keith runs his finger along the corrugations in the floor. “I think I’m gonna have to make the trips less frequent. Just to be safe. Maybe in a couple days those things will lose interest.”

“Well, maybe we’ll be rescued by then.” 

“Hm. Maybe.”

It’s far from encouraging.

Right now, it’s just a waiting game, and they can either hope for rescue or ignore the situation entirely. Either option is better than the one they can’t name: accept that the storm isn’t going to break before it’s too late.

There’s not much more fuel set aside for making a fire. This place was made with more advanced heating techniques in mind. They’re going to need to get creative with their fuel.

Currently, the search involves Shiro sitting on the floor with his legs splayed out before him, digging through a filing cabinet in the main room. The inhabitants of the planet left more than enough stuff behind when they jumped ship for their moon, and data security didn’t seem to be much of a concern for them. That, or they cleared out anything of value before they left. Shiro’s survey of the material is limited at best, considering he can only reach the first few cabinets from his spot on the ground. 

But it works. It’s enough.

“Hey, what do you think these say?” Keith says, holding up some of the files. They’re not made of paper the way that things back on Earth are, but Shiro supposes that in the absence of trees, you can’t really make paper. Not  _ real  _ paper, at least. 

“Scientific data, probably?”

“Hm.” Keith frowns. “Maybe we should bring some back for Allura or Pidge to see. Maybe Hunk?”

“They probably wouldn’t be able to read it either.”

“The Atlas could have old translation data from the castle.”

“You’re that interested?”

Keith shrugs. “You never know. I mean, who knows? Maybe there’s something in here about King Alfor and his family.”

Of course. Shiro smiles. “Allura would like that, I think.” It’s hard to come by concrete evidence of the Alteans’ existence that isn’t just a data file. Especially with the loss of the castle, maybe she’d take solace in the reminders that she and her family had been known, been loved; been remembered. “Good idea, Keith. Keep an eye out for anything that looks familiar, maybe.”

They lapse back into a contemplative silence. Shiro flips through some more of the papers and wishes their armor came loaded with the same translation and processing capabilities as the castle once did. The Atlas could manage it, surely, and probably Black as well. Shiro’s itching to understand the symbols that are this civilization’s letters. The feeling is a familiar one, recognizable after its association with the rise-and-fall in his heart when he’d been a child staring at spaceships. Those had been a distant dream once as well, and even when he was a pilot people still tried to take it from him. He wants to discover something again. He wants to learn.

But there’s nowhere to start, and nobody has any sort of codex to help them unravel the finer intricacies of a foreign language, so as symbols they will remain. Shiro tries not to focus on how the feeling has shifted to just falling, and he turns the page.

They can make something of this yet.

Even without the knowledge of what the words mean, Shiro enjoys his perusal nonetheless. Some of these files have schematics and figures; most of those are mechanical. Those will be interesting to try to parse through for sure. Shiro makes sure to set them aside for later, and the thought of  _ later  _ just reminds him that he’s setting up for a long haul, as if they’re going to be here for much longer. He hesitates, hovering his metal hand over the pile. If they’re going to get out of here soon, he won’t need this.

In the end, though, he leaves the pages be, and he keeps saving the ones with pictures and diagrams that catch his eye. He’s not being pessimistic; he’s just being practical. If they do have to stay, then at least they’ll have reading material.

Keith rolls over onto his back, holding the files up in the air over his face. “Think the civilians up on the moon will mind if we burn these things for fuel?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say that they’re not sacred texts, Keith.” Shiro picks through one of the floor-level drawers of the filing cabinets, thumbing past dividers labeled with words he can’t hope to understand. He pauses and says, “Hey, get it? Limb.”

“What?”

Shiro wiggles his mechanical fingers in midair. “Can only go out on one limb.”

Keith stares at him flatly.

“C’mon, that was funny.” Shiro stares back and hopes his eyes are conveying his favorite brand of  _ Please, Keith. _ “You used to laugh at my jokes.”

The corners of Keith’s mouth begin to twitch up. “At least they’re as bad as they used to be.”

“Worse, maybe,” Shiro supplies cheerfully. 

He wins: Keith’s smile grows until its existence is undeniable, and he ducks his head a little bit. His grin catches the firelight, and maybe the room gets just a little bit warmer. Maybe it’s just Shiro and his heart that stutters and reminds him of all the things the captain of the Atlas shouldn’t consider. Those things shouldn’t even be in his mind, let alone about the leader of Voltron. That must breach all sorts of protocols. It’s not right to want to see Keith smile over and over and over and-

Shiro clears his throat. “Yeah, I think they won’t mind. Also, they abandoned the planet.”

“Okay. Point taken.” Without further ado, Keith rips some of the papers into pieces and throws them onto the fire, turning back to tend to it. “What do you think? A hundred years? A thousand?”

“At least that. Coran only remembers them living on the planet. Said it was too cold for his taste when he visited.”

The fire crackles and pops; it doesn’t smell stellar when it burns whatever this paper was made of. Keith looks over his shoulder and, with a mirthless grin, asks, “Guess we should’ve listened to him and stayed far away, huh?”

“Well. No.”

Keith’s grin falters. “No?”

“Hey. The Coalition’s important. Systems coming together after the oppression of Galra rule and working together to get rid of the last dregs? That’s crucial.” Shiro picks through some more pages. They’re still all gibberish; he slides some of them across the floor to Keith. 

Ripping up the pieces, Keith shrugs and says, “Guess so. Still doesn’t make me love that we’re stuck here. I should’ve noticed that they were forcing us to the surface.” He scowls; little pieces of shredded paper fall around him like snow in a storm all his own. The size of them is admirably tiny, probably due to the claws. He’s certainly frustrated enough that Shiro’s shocked his eyes haven’t gone even faintly gold yet. “It was obvious.”

“We weren’t prepared,” Shiro says gently. “I didn’t notice either.” A white lie, maybe. He knows patterns, and the fighters’ patterns had been wrong.

“Whatever.” Keith starts tossing his shreds into the fire; they kick up little lazy sparks when they go up in flames. “It’s in the past.”

He’s right. No matter how much they feel disappointed by this, there’s nothing they can do about the past. Even as he thinks it, Shiro scorns himself; he knows he’s never going to feel any better about not preventing this from happening. They’re both hypocrites in that way, but they’ll never admit it. They’ll never call each other out on it either, and that just makes them a miserably matched pair. Shiro wonders if it’s a trait shared by all plack paladins, or if it’s just the two of them. A large part of him hopes that it’s the latter. 

He flips to the next page in the text that he has, scanning through it idly. There’s not much on this page, but some of the symbols seem to have been illustrated in what must be their form of calligraphy. If he remembers correctly, it’s just like the illuminated texts back home. The long years spent in the frigid wastes have dulled the color somewhat, but it’s still clear that someone put care into the penmanship. Shiro runs a careful finger over the symbol, and the ink doesn’t budge. It’s been fixed by time or technology, and the color is refreshing in a place so dark and miserable. This file is certainly fancier than some of the others. He turns to the next page.

And this one has an illustration.

Shock forces the air from his chest like a punch, and he welcomes the relief of the exhale. It takes him a moment to truly take in what he’s seeing, but when he realizes the truth of it, he knows that it’s the best thing that’ll happen to them all day short of being miraculously rescued.

This is...amazing.

Keith’s going to  _ love _ this.

“Keith. Keith. Keith.”

Dryly, Keith replies, “Shiro. Shiro. Shiro.” He stands, though, wandering over from the fire to crouch at Shiro’s side. “What?”

Shiro holds up the page he’s looking at. “Look familiar to you?”

Keith grabs his hand to steady it, squinting at the faded pages. Shiro watches patiently, trying to keep his hand as still as possible. Keith’s strong grip helps, of course, but they’re both shaking a bit from the cold. Maybe their oscillations will cancel each other out. Slowly, realization dawns in Keith’s eyes, and he lets out something like a laugh of surprise. It’s one of the happiest sounds he’s made since they’ve crashed here. “Is this-?”

This file must be full of something like history texts. It’s hard not to recognize drawings of armor he’s worn for years. “I think so.”

“No way.”

“Way. Check it out.”

“Look, it’s you,” Keith whispers, and he points to the image of a large figure in black paladin armor standing at the top of some faraway cliff. “Black paladin.”

Shiro squints at the picture. It’s an artist’s rendering, and whoever it was took some liberties with the posing, but those are paladins for sure. “Not me,” he argues. “This was thousands of years ago. That’s Zarkon.” And of course, the red paladin beside him is King Alfor, but Shiro can’t help but buy into the fiction where that’s him on some cliff, head of Voltron once more, and that’s Keith at his side. They’re paladins again, and the Black Lion still welcomes Shiro as her own, and he knows all of Keith’s movements before he makes them. They’re a team again.

It’s a nice little fantasy.

He laughs a little bit. It works well enough to chase away the wistfulness. “Besides, you’re the black paladin now. That’s you.”

“It can be both of us, then,” Keith suggests, “so you can be in the picture too.”

“So you did pick up diplomacy. That’s a compromise for the ages.”

Keith snorts. “Yeah, I was all ready to negotiate on that moon, and now you get to have all of my best lines. You’re welcome.”

“Charmed.” Hopefully, the negotiations are going on up on the moon as planned. The Coalition can’t afford to lose this system. Hunk’s got a talent for negotiation, second only to Allura, and she’s got years on him, so it’s a pretty fair assessment. Shiro’s more than willing to leave it to them, though he’s not sure how the civilians will feel about getting the blue and yellow paladins instead of the black paladins. 

“Hey, Shiro?”

“Yeah, Keith?”

Keith’s gloved finger traces the outlines of all of the paladins. “Don’t throw this one out.”


	2. Chapter 2

Time passes differently when there’s nothing but snow.

Sure, the light shifts a bit as the day goes on, but there’s no change in the shadows that the sparse amount of furniture casts across the frosted floor. When he wakes, it’s a blank and dreary white coming through the windows, and no amount of color bleeds into the space. The metal surfaces in here are utilitarian in every way; there’s nothing to bring life into the space except the sounds of their breathing.

The nights are darker than Shiro thought darkness could get. Without even the faintest hint of the stars, the world collapses into nothingness. They might as well be staring at deep space from this little house. Shiro would believe it if he didn’t still hear the wind. It’s hungry for them. It’ll get them eventually.

He tries not to think about that.

They spend the day in the main room, close to the fire. The smell of the burning papers is unpleasant, and not at all soothing like the pine and cedar smoke of campfires back on Earth, but it’s fire and it’s warm and that’s the most either of them can hope for in a time like this.

Keith’s been working on something for the past few hours, hunching over by the fire with his dagger out and glowing. The unmistakable sharp hiss of steel on steel rasps over to him from where he’s working. Shiro’s curious, but not nearly enough that he’ll bother Keith. 

So he continues flipping through the pages of the file that Keith’s brought over for him. He thinks he might be making a breakthrough in decoding some of the locals’ words. There are plenty of familiar figures that keep cropping up. They must be articles or common nouns. In the back of his mind, he files away a theory that maybe he’ll be able to pick out Voltron’s name in the page that they’ve saved. That figure has a caption, if he remembers correctly. Maybe he can ask Keith to fetch it for him later.

“How’s your suit?” Keith asks suddenly. He unfolds his legs and stands to his full height, towering over Shiro, and makes his way over from the other side of the fire.

Shiro furrows his brow. “My suit?”

Keith nods.

“It’s. Well. Ripped?” Or slashed. Lacerated? He’s not sure of the right word for the sorry state that the cat’s claws left him in. 

The suit’s fucked, is the thing.

“I want to try and fix it. It’s probably letting all the cold air in.”

“A bit, yeah.” A lot. The chill helps numb the pain, at least. He leans back to try to expose the rips for easier access. They pull open with the movement of his body, baring the bandages beneath. “How’re you going to…?”

Keith holds up what he must have been working on the whole time. It’s a piece of metal, slimmed and sharpened. It’s smooth, so it must have been heated a few times over to even out any chips carved into it by the dagger. Holding it out for inspection, Keith says, “I made a needle. I think it’ll kinda work.” He fiddles with it a little bit. “And since the blankets are fraying, I collected some of the strings. It’s not perfect, but I thought maybe it could help.”

“Can I?” He’s curious.

“Sure.” Keith drops the needle into Shiro’s hand.

It’s heavier than Earth needles, so the metal must be a different alloy than what they have here. Shiro tries to handle it with as much care as possible, though. It’s incredible, for the resources that they had available. “How long did the eye take?” Shiro asks, and he squints and closes one eye so he can peer through the rough-hewn hole.

Keith sighs, “Too long.”

“It’s amazing.”

“You think so?”

“Know so.” Shiro hands the needle back. “I know I would never have the patience for that.”

At the praise, Keith practically glows. He twirls the makeshift needle between his fingers and pulls some string from the pack at his belt. He must have been planning this for a while, and it shows in the eagerness with which he threads the needle and carefully ties a knot to keep the string in place. Shiro watches, fascinated. In the back of his mind, he realizes that he also vaguely knows how to mend things. It’s a long-buried skill he’s had since he joined the Garrison, but he never really needed to do it or had the resources. Paladin armor never needed to be fixed, and Garrison suits were replaceable. Keith’s the expert here. Maybe the Marmora suits are made to be slashed open; when the whole organization relies on anonymity and function, then suits are made to be replaced and repaired.

Carefully, Keith identifies the first rip that he wants to work on and pokes the needle through the fabric on one side, pulling it through until the knot on the end catches and stays. He hums in quiet consideration, bridges the gap to the other side of the gash, and continues similarly. Back and forth he goes in a simple pattern. It’s not meant to be anything elaborate, and Shiro didn’t expect it to be. They’re way past field medicine at this point; maybe patch work is the best term. When Keith’s done with the first slash, he ties off the knot, cuts the slack with his dagger, and prepares the remaining thread for the next repair. Shiro shifts experimentally to test how it holds, and Keith lets him do it, sitting back on his heels. 

“Good?” he asks. His eyes tick from the sealed slash to the still open ones and then up to Shiro’s eyes. 

He doesn’t have to lie this time. The stitches are holding. He holds up his right hand in a thumbs-up that twitches a bit - his head flickers with pain - and affirms, “Good.”

Keith nods. “Good,” he repeats. “Good, good. Good.” He begins work on the next slash.

Shiro tries to hold his breath to not move his abdomen as much, but that starts a cough brewing in his chest, so he gives up on it before the agony boils over and the bleeding starts again. The next tactic is to try to breathe only in his chest, letting it do most of the expanding and contracting without the diaphragm making his stomach rise and fall. It kind of works.

“Hold still,” Keith orders softly. “I don’t want to poke you.”

“A lot of poking has already been done,” Shiro reminds him, gesturing at the ruined mess of his body. “Kind of a drop in the bucket at this point.”

Keith exhales through his nose - maybe a laugh - and resolutely continues pulling the thread tight. His hands are shaking in the cold, but Shiro doesn’t comment on it. Keith’s doing something kind for him, and he’s not going to go making him uncomfortable. Even now, Keith’s settling into the rhythm, staring intently at Shiro’s side, and his tongue pokes out from the corner of his mouth the same way it does when he’s running system checks on the Black Lion.

From here, Shiro’s content to watch.

The silence in the building settles over them like a shroud, broken only by the soft spitting and crackling of the fire beside them. Shiro doesn’t think this is the time to talk, though, and besides, he’s too tired to attempt it anyway. Keith, though, is never the silent type for long; despite his sulking in group settings, he’s usually eager to break a silence. Even knowing that, Shiro thinks he’s hallucinating the first time he hears a set of quiet notes. Keith’s lips aren’t moving, though: he must be humming.

Broken up and sporadic, the notes don’t come together into a tune, or at least not one that Shiro recognizes. This seems more like a subconscious song, pulled briefly into their shared space whenever Keith’s body resonates too strongly with the melody to keep it bottled up inside. There must be a whole song winding its way across Keith’s heart, soothing him through the process of the needle’s dance between the sections of Shiro’s suit that’ve been torn asunder.

The music ends, though, as all good things here tend to do. “I think that’s it.” Keith ties a knot at the end of the last slash, carefully brings his dagger over, and cuts the loose end of the string.

Shiro inspects the work that Keith’s done. The sides are a bit puckered here and there, and the seam will change in shape as soon as Shiro starts moving, but the repair is undeniably functional. For a patch job done on a suit still on a body, the quality’s astounding. If there were seamstresses on this planet, Shiro would choose Keith’s work over theirs. It’s honest, not flashy, and practical, and Shiro thinks he needs that stability right now. 

“It looks great,” he says honestly. “I think it’ll hold.” He tries to tuck some of the loose pieces into the seam, kind of succeeds, and calls that a victory. No reply reaches his ears, though, and he frowns; usually, Keith would at least make some sort of noise to answer something he’s said. “Keith?”

He looks up.

Is Keith about to cry?

His lip sits between his too-sharp teeth, red and verging on bloody. The tension written on his face stands out stark and angular on his bones, betraying the clench in his jaw and the furrow in his brow. Something’s wrong; it must be the sewing. He’s still staring at the bloodstained fabric that he’s just sealed up.

“Keith, hey-” Shiro tries to sit up a bit more. “Keith. It’s good. You did a good job.”

In a watery, tight voice, Keith says, “No, it’s - it’s ugly.”

Ugly? How could he even think that? “Keith, c’mon.”

Keith snaps, “No, Shiro!” and stands, fists clenched at his sides. “It’s not what you deserve. You deserve - fuck, I don’t even-” He makes a wordless, disgusted noise and cuts himself off. He pauses, breathing heavily, and looks down at his hands. Slowly, he opens his right hand.

“Oh, Keith,” Shiro says before he can stop himself.

The handmade needle that Keith spent all day on - it’s bent and warped, crushed by the force of Keith’s frustration.

And Keith just stares at it.

“Fuck,” he mutters, and he tosses the ruined needle to the side. It skitters to a stop near the fire, catching the light in its dully mirrored depths. Keith stares at it, lip curling in distaste. Up close, it’s clear that he’s shaking. “I thought if I could fix just one-” He cuts himself off and shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut, but not before Shiro sees how they’ve gone golden. “Never mind,” he growls, and he stands.

Shiro cranes his neck to try to catch his gaze. “Keith, hey-”

“I’m going out.” Keith starts to walk away.

On instinct, Shiro reaches out with his metal arm - it fights him briefly, but he manages to keep it under control - and holds Keith by the wrist. “Stay here, Keith.” Shiro keeps his grip light; keeps it gentle. He can’t hold Keith back if he really wants to leave. That’s like stopping a storm in its tracks. “How much is going to change if you stay for a little while longer?”

Keith stands, still and silent, and stares at him.

That’s a start. He’s not fighting. Shiro tries, “Maybe you could stay here by the fire. Get a little warmer. It’s not good for you to keep putting yourself out in the cold.” Every time, it hurts to let Keith go out there where predators stalk and there’s nobody to watch his back for him. He should be there for Keith, not sitting here and hoping that just one more trip won’t be the one that kills him. “I worry,” he says, and he hopes Keith doesn’t hear the quiver in his voice that betrays just how true it is.

“It’s just one trip.”

“Then you can put off just one if it’s so unimportant.”

With a glacial slowness, Keith sinks to his knees at Shiro’s side once more. He carefully smooths down a stray piece of fabric that was left hanging in the repair process, frowning. It’s probably part of what he hates. Shiro covers that hand with his own and moves it away from the wound. There’s no use in worrying about it now. 

“Here, look: you did a good job. I like it,” Shiro says. And he does; the wind doesn’t bite at the skin beneath the slashes the way it’d been doing before. He hadn’t even noticed how bad it was until now, when its absence is immediately apparent. He smiles again. “See?”

Keith bites his lip; Shiro thinks he might see it tremble before it’s quelled by the pressure of teeth. He nods. It’s small and barely an acknowledgement, but it’s a start.

Shiro sighs and sits up a bit more so that he can bring his face level with Keith’s. “C’mere.”

Slowly, Keith leans forward, and Shiro reaches out to meet him. He finds purchase on the back of Keith’s head, threading his fingers through the chilled strands of his hair. It’s as much of an anchor for his sake as it is for Keith’s, and he takes solace in having Keith close, having him safe. He brings their foreheads knocking together gently. It doesn’t matter that his eyes are closed; he can feel the way Keith shudders against him.

“Thank you,” he breathes with as much sincerity as he can muster. He hopes Keith can feel how much he means it. “Keith.”

“Shiro,” Keith replies softly, like this call and response is enough of a conversation. Maybe it is.

Shiro inhales and exhales, just sharing the space with Keith. The moment is too precious to give up; when else is he going to let go of his pain and just exist? He can’t remember the last time he felt this at peace. The warmth between them only grows; maybe they can supplement what the fire is offering them and share the heat inherent to their own bodies, meager as it may be. They’re a team.

And for the first time in a while, Shiro believes that they’re going to get out of here alive. Together.

He lets his eyes slip shut, and his body relaxes against Keith’s. This moment of respite is what his beaten bones have needed; he can enjoy it for a moment more without worries. He knows Keith won’t let him fall. He never has.

“Keith,” he begins, but he hasn’t figured out what he needs to say.

He shouldn’t have shattered their silence. Keith flinches and pulls away. “I need to...check on Black,” he says faintly. “What if she woke up?”

“She can wait.”

Keith’s already standing, though, leaving Shiro cold. “I just-”

He doesn’t finish the sentence and punctuates it with the clatter of his helmet when he tries to grab it and sends it rolling across the floor instead. He murmurs something that might be a curse, but Shiro’s not sure of the language. There’s a whole library of knowledge in Keith’s mind, and Shiro can’t hope to unravel it all.

Now, though, his body language screams discomfort, screams  _ I need my space,  _ and Shiro’s heart hurts for him.

Shiro bites his lip, torn between apologizing or just letting Keith be. He leaves the silence stretching between them, and it solidifies into distance as Keith stumbles away towards the door, scooping up his helmet along the way. 

What did he do that’s sending Keith running?

 

* * *

 

The next day, Keith leaves before Shiro wakes up.

Shiro wakes to a colder room than usual, and to a silent house. The fire crackles in the next room, but that’s not proof that he’s not alone. Shiro knows when Keith’s around, and his absence is just as chilling as the air. 

There’s no way he’ll make it to the fire on his own without tearing at the barely-healing slashes on his side. He’ll have to wait until Keith comes back if he wants to get a bit warmer. Without his usual reading material that he keeps in the main room, he’s got nothing but his thoughts to keep him company. Shiro stares at the ceiling and decides that diving into his own head is not a safe pastime. There’s too much in there that he’s keeping frozen and locked away, and there’s not enough heat in him to even begin to thaw it away.

“Just count weblums,” he mutters. Do weblums travel in packs? Maybe they’re called herds. Or flocks. Or murders, like crows. They’re planet killers, after all. 

Pidge would probably laugh at him if she could see him now. That, or she’d count using an entirely different metric. Or do equations. Or come up with new ones. Is it possible to come up with new equations on the spot? That sounds like something Pidge can do.

_ One. _

_ Two. _

_ Three. _

Hell, he barely remembers what a weblum looks like. Counting Galra is a bit too close to home, though, and he doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen a sheep in person. 

Maybe he could count lions.

Across the little building, the door bangs open, echoing in the hollow shell of whatever civilization this was. The howl of wind accompanies it, and the cold burst of storm air sends rogue snowflakes spiralling into Shiro’s room. 

But nobody calls out to him.

Shiro tries his best to sit up, holding up his right hand in anticipation of whatever’s coming to get them. This arm doesn’t weaponize the way his old one did, but that was the whole point, right? Power to create versus power to destroy?

It’s not destruction. Just defense.

He can probably still put up a bit of a fight. A bad leg and a stab wound won’t bring him down completely. Shiro grimaces and pushes himself to his feet; he staggers when he places his weight on the bad leg and almost falls, but he sends the prosthetic arm out to counterbalance himself. It works well enough. Shrugging the few threadbare blankets off, he shuffles closer to the door to the main room. The bitterly cold wind blasts him in the face; something or someone has opened the door and let the storm in. 

If only Keith had left his bayard behind for Shiro to use. There’s no sort of weapon that he has other than the crushing power of his prosthetic, but even that’s faulty right now. He flexes the fingers anyway, but the movement is jerky. It’ll have to do.

The wind howls at him from the other room. Shiro braces himself and prepares for a fight, and he makes his way through the door.

It’s just Keith, panting in the doorway with snow in his hair. 

“Shiro!” he exclaims, arms full of the snow- and blood-drenched body of one of the alien cats. He drags it further into the room and slams the door behind himself, banishing the howling storm from their little enclave.

_ Thank god.  _ Shiro sags in the doorway, dropping his arm to clutch at his side again. “Keith,” he breathes.

Keith lets the corpse fall to the floor and is in front of Shiro in a heartbeat, reaching out and stepping into his space. He doesn’t touch Shiro, though, and that seems to distress him even more. 

“My hands are - uh - fuck. They’re bloody. I don’t wanna touch you and make you smell like-”

“Like a butcher shop, I know.” Shiro waves him off, gritting his teeth against the pain in favor of smiling at Keith. “I’m fine. It’s not like it reopened or anything. You just startled me.”

Still, Keith hovers in his space, holding his hands out to just barely brush against Shiro’s shoulders before withdrawing them once more. In the soft bluish glint of his armor, his hands light up, and Shiro’s able to see how they glisten dark red. It’s the dangerous, violent edge of Keith that Shiro’s always known has been part of him, but it’s counter measured by the warm concern in his violet eyes. “You’re sure?” he asks, and Shiro forgets about the blood.

Ignoring the scent of iron in his nose, Shiro nods and says, “I’m okay.”

“You don’t have to be okay,” Keith tells him softly. “I’m the reason you’re even walking around right now. You should be in bed.”

“Keith.” Not this again.

“I should have warned you I was coming in.”

“You’re good.” Shiro tries his best to straighten up and look Keith in the eye. “It was all for a good reason.” He waits another beat, and still Keith stays in his space, close enough that he could easily lean in and-

Keith clears his throat. “Yeah,” he agrees, a little loudly. “Yeah, I brought this.” He steps back, turning to bend down at the creature’s immobile head. He runs a hand along the savage line of its neck, tracing the dark stripes that mark its shoulders. “It’s kind of pretty when it’s not trying to kill you.”

He’s got a point. The reality of what they do hits Shiro at the oddest times; they’re exploring the limits of deep space, and that’s an alien creature. He’s the captain of a spaceship, and Keith is half alien, and they’re stranded together on a planet of eternal winter.

Funny how that all happens.

Regardless, the creature is beautiful in a sad, violent sort of way: sad because it must have had a full life ahead of it in this land its kind rules, and violent because the mere sight of its claws makes Shiro shiver with something that can’t just be the bitter cold. Beautiful because it’s familiar. Somehow. 

Maybe he’s remembering it wrong, but Shiro’s sure that he’s seen stripes like that before. 

The insidious part of Shiro’s mind, the one that he manages to silence most of the time, suggests a memory from within the Black Lion’s sleeping quarters during the time they’d forged through space on their way back to Earth. And maybe it’s the pain, and maybe his wound is finally getting to his head, but he can’t help but call the image to mind. He lets it take him, drifting off to someplace warmer than this frigid wasteland far from home.

_ “I hate trading posts,” Keith snaps, throwing his helmet to the side. It clatters off to rest near his little trunk full of spare clothes - his only possessions that he’d saved from the Castle of Lions. “Nobody listens, and they rip us off.” _

_ Shiro scratches at his head, watching the tense line of Keith’s shoulders. “Did we buy something this time?” Nearly every outpost so far has been a bust. Nobody seems to want to sell them anything, even when the name of Voltron is carefully mentioned. Not that Shiro would know; he usually doesn’t go along on the shopping trips. They’d found out pretty early that nobody likes trading with a man who has a Galra arm, severed or not. _

_ Keith nods, but he follows it with a rough curse in the Galra tongue. “Mom says she doubts we would’ve gotten a better price anywhere else in this quadrant, and we need the parts if we want to get out of the quadrant, so. You know. Lose-lose.” _

_ “Great.” Shiro hangs his head, and the white tuft of his hair falls into his eyes. Again, he tries to reach up with his right hand to push it out of the way, and phantom pain shoots up into his mind when it realizes that there’s nothing to move anymore. At least before, he’d had the prosthetic to simulate the feeling of being whole. Now, in a foreign body that’s destroyed itself in its attempts to kill the paladins, there’s no escaping the reality of how broken he is. _

_ Hopefully, the movement isn’t obvious enough to be caught. _

_ “Whatever.” Keith strips off the white plates of his paladin armor, piling them beside his cot and the helmet. “I don’t want to think about it for the next few vargas.” He twists a bit, reaching for the zipper at the back of his black under suit with practiced ease, and tugs it down. “We’re not heading out until we all get some rest. The lions need to charge.” _

_ The charge won’t last long, of course, but the sentiment is good enough. They can use anything they can get, and whatever extra charge the lions get will more than make up for the time they’ll lose by waiting the night here. “That’s fine.” _

_ “Not much else we can do.” Keith shrugs out of the suit completely, stripping down to just his underwear beneath. In the purple-white lighting of their quarters in the Black Lion, he’s pale even after being exposed to the light of half a hundred different suns. That’s the effect of wearing almost nothing but armor for all their time out in space. With every day, they have less time to be comfortable. But for once, Keith’s letting himself be vulnerable. They have the night off. They can relax. _

_ It’s been a while since Shiro’s seen Keith like this. _

_ When did he get so many scars? _

_ Shiro might have been the cause of some of them, or at least his clone was. Others look like the routine sort of starbursts that mark laser shots. Still others are sword or claw marks, probably from interactions with the Galra. And then there are bruises. They’ve gotten into too many skirmishes, and Keith keeps throwing himself into harm’s way to protect the paladins. That’s his thing, after all, try as the paladins might to get him to stop. He may have been tempered a bit by his years in the quantum abyss, but he’s still the same Keith at heart. Old habits die hard, and the bruises are proof. _

_ But beneath the scars, dark enough to stand out but faint enough to look like old wounds, there are symmetrical markings at his shoulders and waist. At first glance, Shiro’s eyes slide right over them, but when he does a subtle double take, he can tell that they’re something entirely different. Something natural. Something new. Or at least they’re something he’d never noticed before. _

_ Almost like- _

_ Almost like stripes. _

_ “You okay?” Keith’s looking over his shoulder at him. _

_ Shiro clears his throat and looks away, focusing on the doorway across the room. “Fine,” he manages. _

_ He shouldn’t be looking. _

_ “Fine,” Keith echoes, and Shiro can hear the curiosity in his voice. _

_ Shiro closes his eyes and tries to memorize the pattern of stripes across scarred skin. _

“Did you kill that?” he asks to bring himself back into the moment.

Keith raises an eyebrow and picks wet strands of fur out from between the fingers of his gloves. “No, I found it already with a stab wound. Yeah, Shiro, I killed it.” He makes a vaguely disgusted noise and plucks a large, slightly bloody clump of fur from his forearm. “I smell like wet cat,” he complains. “The wolf’s gonna hate this when we get back.”

_ When we get back.  _ As if there’s still hope. Shiro appreciates that he’s not the only optimist in the room. And now that he thinks about it, yeah. It does sort of smell like wet cat in here. Shiro tries his best to hide how much he hates the smell. Maybe it works. He says, “No need to be rude about it.”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, then.” Keith flashes him a crooked smile. “And then I won’t have to be rude.”

He supposes he can’t argue with that logic. It’s hard to focus on coming up with some sort of response, anyway. The cobwebs in his brain have frozen over. The one thing that’s always been able to pierce it, though, is concern, and he gives voice to it. “Where’s your helmet?” he asks. There shouldn’t be snow on Keith’s head, no matter how much he enjoys the small constellations that it forms on the ink-black sky of his hair.

As if on cue, an errant lock of hair falls in front of Keith’s eyes. He pushes it out of the way with the back of his hand, smearing a bit of blood on his forehead along with it. Sheepishly, he says, “Might’ve, uh. Temporarily lost it in the scuffle.”

“Let your guard down?”

“I know how to fight, old timer,” Keith snaps back. “You’re just jealous that you don’t take risks like I do.”

Shiro, despite the nervousness holding his heart in a vice grip at the thought of Keith fighting alone and vulnerable in the swirling snow, laughs. “I think you’re overcompensating because you don’t have me to save your ass.”

“I’m lost without you,” Keith replies, but something in his drawl hitches.

That’s a nerve. There’s something like truth in there, but it’s gone before Shiro can dwell on it.

“I think it’s one of their young.” Keith lifts one of the massive paws, inspecting it carefully. “But, like. Look at the size of this thing.”

Shiro slides down the wall, sitting down in the doorway, and grins. “You want me to give you a medal?”

The clawed paw aims at him. Keith sights along the length of it, eyes narrowed. “I’m not bragging.”

“Sounds like bragging to me, Keith. I dunno.”

“You’re one to talk, Captain.”

“Oh yeah, head of Voltron?” Shiro fires back.

Keith retorts, “Only became the head after  _ you _ were leader first.”

“I think it was a coup.”

“No,” Keith insists, eyes sparkling with humor. “You died.”

As soon as he says it, the color drains from his face.

Shiro blinks. 

It doesn’t exactly catch him off guard, at least no more than it usually does when he remembers every once in a while, but hearing it out loud is its own thing entirely. Hearing it in Keith’s voice is almost worse. He wants to give voice to how it feels, but for once his words fail him, and he’s left staring wide-eyed at Keith like a deer in headlights. 

“Shiro, I didn’t-”

“It’s fine,” Shiro interrupts quickly, because he can’t stand seeing Keith look that pained. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

They fall silent.

And that’s another reality that hits Shiro sometimes, in the quiet moments between wakefulness and sleep.

He died.

Funny how that all happens.

Softly, into the chilly silence between them, Shiro offers, “And then you brought me back.”

Keith stares at him from behind the black starfall of his hair. “Yeah, I guess so,” he admits. If anything, his voice is even quieter, just barely working past the ice crystals of the moment. Maybe he sounds a little proud, or at least a little relieved. It’s too dark to tell whether or not he blushes. He sits down beside the carcass and twirls his Marmora blade in his hand. “I’m gonna-”

“Yeah.” Shiro waves a hand. “Go for it. I’ll...stay here.” He’s sort of locked himself into a sitting position now; chances are high that he’ll need Keith if he has any chance of standing up again. That’s fine; the bedroom is lonely anyway. He does wish he had his blankets, though. Now that Keith’s thrown the door open, he’s let in enough cold air to dispel the heat generated by the fire in the main room. The fire will have to suffice for now.

Though he hesitates, frozen for a few minutes and twirling his dagger the way he does when he’s nervous, Keith ends up sitting down and beginning to cut into the corpse of his kill. Shiro’s never actually seen an animal’s insides in such a clinical, casual setting. It’s fascinating, really, and oddly devoid of violence. It’s more like an art, really.

Intent on his work, Keith doesn’t seem to notice or acknowledge Shiro’s eyes on him. He carefully separates the thick hide from the creature’s body in practiced, sure strokes of his blade. He’s keeping those pieces intact; maybe he intends to set them aside for more insulation. If that fur works to keep those creatures alive, maybe it’ll work for them.

Caught up in watching, Shiro hardly feels any pain. He welcomes the relief, however temporary it may be.

After a few long minutes of silence, Shiro says, “You’re good at this.”

Keith looks up through his bangs, still carving through the carcass. “Comes with practice, I guess.” He sets aside a hunk of meat, frowning at the odd grayish color of it. “You’d be surprised how similar anatomy can be, even between planets. You’ve killed one, you’ve killed them all, y’know?”

“Sure?”

“Guess it’s not a universal thing.” Keith’s grin turns a little sheepish. “I spent a lot of time hunting for my meals with my mom.” He sits back on his heels and taps his dagger idly on the floor. 

“You miss her?”

“All the time. Guess it’s true that you don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” He pauses, then adds, “But we’ll be home soon. Then I can see her and Kolivan and the wolf.”

“All your favorites,” Shiro says.

Keith meets his eyes for a moment, steady and calculating. “Some of them, sure.”

Who else is on that list?

Keith ends up sitting beside him at the fire once he’s done, occasionally prodding fragments of old case files into the flames to keep them going. The smell of cooking food, alien as it is, makes things feel more normal, if only for a short while.

It’s a bit of a parody of the little campfires they used to set out in the desert together. The fire still dances and crackles in the soothing way it always has. Keith still curls up with his knees to his chest, poking at the flames like he’s provoking the wrath of some ancient spirit of fire. That’s his nature, after all. He’s always ready for a fight.

“Makes you want to jump on a hoverbike and race, huh?” Keith asks softly.

Shiro turns to look at him in surprise. Keith’s still watching the flames. The way they’re sitting, Keith’s face is in profile, lit all in flickering gold. 

“You’re thinking about home too, huh?”

“It’s a good memory,” Keith admits. “Warm.”

“Warm, yeah,” Shiro echoes, still studying how the firelight catches the angles of Keith’s jaw.

Keith turns at that moment, eyes wide, and he’s closer than Shiro anticipated. “Shiro,” he says, voice hushed, but nothing more comes from him.

“Yeah?” He has to speak, or his body will try to find a different way to occupy itself. This place is torture in more ways than one, and times like this just remind him of that.

“I...never mind.” Keith’s eyes dart down, lower than Shiro’s eyes, and then back up again. “Just...the desert was so long ago, y’know?”

It’s not what he was going to say, and they both know it, but Shiro doesn’t have any idea what he could have wanted to say instead. They hold each other’s gaze for a moment more before the fire spits an ember up into the air and drags their attention away. This way, it’s easier, and Shiro’s voice finds its courage again.

They trade jibes about the times each of them beat the other at a race. Shiro insists that he’s the best at taking on cliff jumps, but Keith counters that cliff jumps don’t matter if Keith beats him to the cliff in the first place.

It’s just like how it used to be before the war. Before Kerberos. Before Shiro left.

And for a little while, it’s almost pleasant to be here. It’s just the two of them in their own space, and though it’s not ideal, they’re making it work. Shiro doesn’t need to think about the constant low ache of pain that lingers just below his threshold of discomfort, waiting to flare up once more. That’s all secondary. That’s all another Shiro’s problem. This Shiro - the Shiro of now, and of this moment with Keith at the fire - wants to sit here and enjoy his peace for as long as he can get it.

Eventually, the food looks as cooked as it’s going to get, short of setting it ablaze. With Keith’s help, Shiro lifts the food from the fire and tries to cut it into chunks.

“It doesn’t look very appetizing, does it?” he asks. He frowns down at the hunk of meat, poking at it with Keith’s dagger. Maybe the bit of charring on the one side will help the flavor. After some effort, Shiro manages to cut off a sinewy piece and hold it up in the firelight, inspecting it carefully. “Maybe the fat will add some flavor?”

“I don’t think there’s any fat, Shiro.”

“No, I think I see some.”

Keith squints at him. “You’re a liar.”

“I’m an optimist.” Shiro holds the dagger out to Keith; it feels weird in his hand anyway. Nice, but weird. “You try it.”

“You just don’t want to eat it first,” Keith accuses.

“You know me very well; congrats.”

Keith flips him off. “Yeah, my prize is getting to be the first to taste the thing that almost ripped my throat out.”

“Don’t cheapen the victory.” It sends Shiro’s heart thudding in a dull panic again. He doesn’t like thinking about the peril Keith was in all alone out there. He grins past the fear and nods to the piece of meat speared on the knife. “Revel in my culinary excellence.”

Keith sticks his tongue out in a profoundly childish gesture, and Shiro returns it, still staring expectantly at Keith. Finally, with a heavy sigh, Keith raises the food to his mouth and takes a bite.

He chews.

Shiro waits.

Keith grimaces.

_ Oh, no. _

“It’s good,” Keith tells him, but his face is kind of screwed up in that way it did when Coran tried to feed them absurd space food when they first became paladins. It might be endearing if it weren’t a direct result of Shiro’s cooking. Keith catches his eye and looks almost panicked before he schools his expression into a gruesome caricature of a smile. The effect is diminished somewhat by the despair in his eyes and all of the food in his mouth.

God, he looks miserable.

“There’s no seasoning,” Shiro says by way of apology.

Keith screws his eyes shut, swallows, and holds up a thumbs-up. “No, it’s great,” he rasps after a moment. “Nothing like alien cat for dinner.”

“I tried my best.” To prove his point, Shiro takes his first bite.

As it turns out, the charring on the side didn’t help.

The meat’s far stringier than Shiro expected, gamey and tough with none of the satisfaction of jerky from back home. Even worse, it tastes obscene. There’s no other word for it. Alien meat was not made with human palates in mind, apparently, and not Galra ones either. Shiro keeps himself from gagging and calls that a success. 

“Keith,” he mumbles with his mouth full, “you’ve gotta forgive me.”

“I don’t.”

“Keith,” he begs again, but with the way he’s desperately trying to keep his taste buds away from the food - unsuccessfully - it comes out more like  _ Keef  _ and frankly he hates that he likes the way it sounds. “I’m  _ sorry.” _

Keith’s eyes narrow, and there’s a little flash of mischief in his eyes. “You don’t look very sorry.”

Shiro, with great difficulty, swallows the bite of food. He’d tried to chew it as little as possible, which has introduced complications all its own. He hopes his body will be able to digest alien tissue. This is the worst thing to ever happen to them; he tells Keith as much.

“Worse than dying?” Keith’s eyebrows quirk up in a little question. It’s a gentle foray into the topic they’d stumbled across earlier. Shiro knows Keith well enough to find the peace offering in there.

He grins through the agony of eating and quips, “At least that was quick. This is torture.”

The delighted smile in Keith’s eyes is enough of a reward that Shiro forgets about how bad the food is for a moment.

“It’s horrible,” Keith says, though, taking another bite. He swallows it with a very minimal amount of chewing, which isn’t safe in Shiro’s opinion.

“It is, isn’t it?” He can’t help but offer a rueful little smile. “Gotta keep our energy up, though.” He cuts off another slice of the meat and offers it to Keith. “C’mon. Eat up, soldier.”

There’s a moment of hesitation where it genuinely looks like Keith is going to refuse him and slap the food out of his hand. Shiro can pinpoint the exact stages of his mental war between his taste buds and his common sense. The power of Keith’s taste buds almost wins out. But defeat settles on Keith’s shoulders, and he sighs. He leans in and holds Shiro’s wrist to steady his hand, and he bites the piece of meat off the blade. He pulls back, succeeding admirably at scowling and chewing simultaneously.

His hand stays on Shiro’s wrist, though.

Was he always this strong?

Shiro grins and twirls the dagger in his hand, mindful of the tiny distance between the blade and Keith’s face. Keith stares back at him, utterly nonplussed. 

“I can’t believe you tried to poison me.”

“Keith-”

“After everything I’ve done for you.”

_ “Keith.” _

Keith pulls another face; this time, the expression’s grossly exaggerated, and Shiro’s almost offended. It’s only partially his fault that the alien cat tastes so bad.

He complains, “Keith…”

There’s a pause. Keith narrows his eyes.

Shiro pouts.

The scowl shivers and breaks, and then Keith’s laughing. It’s been so long since he’s seen Keith laugh that Shiro’s taken aback by the sight. But not disappointed. How could he be, when joy crinkles the corners of Keith’s eyes and forces him to scrunch his nose up to accommodate the force of his smile? Laughter banishes the worried lines from his forehead, leaving him instead as Keith.

Shiro knows that Keith.

That’s the person who used to race him through dusty canyons. That’s the person who learned that he was chosen by the fastest, brightest lion of Voltron and decided to embrace it. That’s the person Shiro saw and thought  _ he belongs in the stars. _

There’s no reason not to add his own voice to create a new harmony between them. He laughs, forgetting how miserable the food tastes, and the joy feels warm at the center of his chest. Like this, it’s easy to imagine that they’re someplace warmer and kinder and safer. 

But they’ve never had good luck, and misfortune has chased Shiro for years now.

Not even laughing is safe; it aggravates his injury in a lancing slash of burning pain through his entire torso. Shiro gasps and doubles over, and Keith’s dagger clatters to the ground, forgotten. 

Keith springs around the flames in half a heartbeat, inhumanly quick, and kneels at Shiro’s side. One hand flattens against his spine and the other rests on the uninjured leg. The twin beacons help to ground him; they provide a more comforting source of warmth than the flaring pain of the wound. One of Keith’s thumbs begins to rub in slow, absent circles over the curve of his knee. 

“Shiro?”

“I’m good,” he promises, voice tight around a cough he’s trying desperately to hold back. The back of this throat has a faint iron taste to it. 

Keith mutters, “Maybe we should just finish up. You should get back in bed.”

Shiro closes his eyes and nods; he doesn’t have the energy to argue. “I...yeah. Yeah.”

He lets Keith lead him back to the bedroom, lying there shivering until Keith covers him in the blankets he’d scattered around earlier. If he didn’t protest, he’s pretty sure Keith would have stripped off his own suit to keep him warm. Luckily, Keith heeds Shiro’s muttered threat of a court martial and withdraws back to the main room, poking around with something metallic. Shiro thinks he might hear a filing cabinet open and then close again.

And outside, the storm still rages.

He measures the passing of time by the way the fire gets dimmer over time. After a bit, though, something crackles and the orange glow gets brighter, so there must have been some new fuel put on the fire to keep them warm through the night.

Keith comes in after another hour or so, when the light has been completely extinguished outside and the windows show only darkness. He frowns when Shiro’s eyes fall on him. “You’re still awake.”

“Couldn’t sleep.” It’s true; the pain won’t let him rest. They don’t have any painkillers here, and the cold can only numb so much.

“That’s not good for you,” Keith scolds, scooping up the last of the blankets so that he can settle down at the floor by Shiro’s bedside. 

Shiro shrugs and immediately regrets it. “A lot of things aren’t good for me, Keith. I can name a few, and they all have the word ‘rib’ in them.”

“Very funny. Get some sleep.”

“They’re fractured, Keith.”

“I know, Shiro.” Keith whacks the closest leg of the bed, and Shiro snorts and mutters an apology. “Accepted, Captain. Now sleep. You need your rest.”

“So do you.” Shiro considers his next words carefully. “It’s getting cold in here.”

Keith hums and shifts a little bit on the floor. “Think it’s always cold in here, Shiro.”

“Exactly. Don’t keep sleeping on the floor, Keith. It’s freezing.” And it’ll continue to get more freezing the more they open the door to come in and out. Every foray into the storm to search for help saps some of the heat they’ve been trying desperately to foster. Soon, Shiro expects that the temperature will drop below freezing. He’s not sure how much longer they’ll survive after that.

“I’m fine.”

Shiro opens his eyes and looks down at where he expects Keith to be. In the near-darkness, he’s surprised by how luminous Keith’s eyes are. The bluish light of Shiro’s arm illuminates every facet there, picking out the stars in the dark violet expanse of them. Shiro trails off before he even begins to protest, staring instead at the nebulas in Keith’s gaze.

What was he going to say?

“Shiro,” Keith murmurs, and his lips barely move, but a puff of silvery smoke billows from between them. Shiro wonders how his lips look up close when they’re curving around the sound of his name.

Wait. He was going to ask something like that.

“You should get off the floor,” he says when he manages to find his voice again.

Keith frowns. “You’re hurt.”

“I’ll live.” Shiro holds out a hand. “Come to bed.”

He winces at the way his voice sounds.

Soft.

He didn’t mean for it to sound like-

Like-

He clears his throat to get rid of the thought. It’s uncomfortably loud after how quiet they’ve been. “Just. It’ll keep both of us warm.”

Keith eyes him dubiously. “Shiro.”

“Keith.” Shiro reaches out with his uninjured left arm and catches Keith by the shoulder. “I promise I’ll be fine.”

The fight drains from Keith’s shoulders when Shiro touches him. He sighs and nods. “You stay on the inside, though,” he says. “Against the wall, where you’re safe.”

“We’re safe in here, Keith.”

“You’re safer against the wall,” Keith says with an icy certainty reflected by the puff of his breath.

Shiro mumbles, “You’re not gonna let me win this one, are you?”

“Nope. Move over.” Keith lifts himself from the floor and settles on the edge of the bed. He sits there, staring expectantly at Shiro until he moves closer to the wall.

Shiro turns onto his right side; he’s too broad to share the bed if he stays on his back. The cuff from his new arm makes it very convenient to sleep on his side, and he takes full advantage of it now. “I’m getting cold,” he warns, and he hopes Keith can hear the invitation in the joke.

The weight distribution on the bed shifts, and Keith’s form stretches out behind him. The bulk of him traps heat against Shiro’s back; he’s close enough that the warmth doesn’t escape the space between them, if it can even be called a space.

Keith’s arm snakes around his waist carefully, and without adding too much pressure. Shiro feels himself relax. It’s hard to be comfortable when he’s a hair’s breadth away from freezing to death at any given moment, but this time it’s simple. Keith’s arms lend more warmth than he’s felt in days.

It’s just like he’s always imagined it.

It would be so easy to turn over and steal a kiss or two or a million. It would be even easier for him to sink further into Keith’s embrace, or for Keith to close the distance between them and turn the warm rhythm of his breath on Shiro’s skin into the firebrand of a kiss. Shiro lets his eyes sink shut, falling out of the moment and further into the daydream. It’s warmer there, at least. The endless possibilities of the moment spread out before him, and Shiro lets them drag him closer to slumber. These things are better off kept in dreams.

Then Keith moves closer.

He must be falling asleep, or else he’d never do something like this. Keith’s arm around his waist is a sure, heavy weight, and it tightens just a bit, even now.

Shiro is aware of every part where they’re connected to each other.

He stays very, very still.

But Keith makes a soft sound that might be a sigh, pressing his face closer to the nape of Shiro’s neck. The warm puffs of his breath against Shiro’s skin send goosebumps all down his back that have nothing to do with the blizzard outside. 

Carefully, Shiro asks, “Keith?”

His voice is too loud in the silence. Against his back, Keith tenses, and the moment’s broken, whatever it was. The soft embrace of Keith’s arm around his waist withdraws almost too quickly. Like he’d been waiting to do it, or hoping.

Of course. Of course.

Keith doesn’t want this. Shiro’s pushing his impossible fantasies over what’s really just Keith trying to protect him. He’s being kind and bold and  _ Keith,  _ and Shiro keeps messing this up.

“Sorry,” Keith mumbles, and he turns away, curling up with the curve of his spine just barely touching Shiro’s. 

The movement sends cold air rushing into the space between them. Already, the lack of shared body heat makes Shiro shudder. The icy draft saps all the stored heat from him, and he curls in as far into himself as he can manage without sobbing from pain.

This is fine.

It seems like they’ll both be shivering tonight.

This is fine.

 

* * *

 

Shiro dreams of lions, far away.

He dreams of lions falling from the sky.

He dreams of watching from a crippled ship, powerless to do anything but watch. A word jumps to his lips, but when he screams, it has no sound.

The word escapes him. It might be a name. Maybe. 

Maybe.


	3. Chapter 3

Shiro wakes up alone with Keith at his side.

He’s never had this feeling before. It’s dangerously akin to how it had been when he was a too-young pilot in the Garrison, invited to parties to celebrate some advancement or another. Anyone worth their stripes was invited, but Shiro’d been the youngest; he’d been their star, and so he’d been invited, and then everyone seemed to realize that they didn’t have much to say to a teenager. Alone in a room. Uncomfortable.

Never before, though, has he felt like this while he’s been with Keith.

Even now, chills creep down his spine, but maybe that’s just because he can feel the icy press of Keith’s back against his.

The younger part of him had wanted company. Maybe now he can try to find some; he can hunt for common ground.

“Good morning.”

The curve of Keith’s back stiffens for a moment. “Yeah,” he replies, voice rough with something that must be sleep. “Yeah, g’morning.” He stands abruptly and begins assembling his armor. The movement sends cold air rushing over Shiro and under the blankets they’ve been sharing. “I’m gonna go check on the weather.”

Shiro struggles to sit up, wincing when the wound pulls and aches beneath his bandages. He tries to rub the sleep from his eyes, but everything is half-frozen and miserable. After a few tries, he gives up and pushes his hair out of his face instead. It makes him feel like a little less of an animal and more like a human, and at this point he’s willing to call that a victory.

It takes him a moment to process what Keith’s just said. The cold always leaves him leaden and lethargic, though that might be the pain as well. “Wait. The weather?”

“Yeah.”

“Keith, just look outside the window.” Hell, if they just go silent for a minute they’ll be able to hear the restless, hungry howl of the wind that wants nothing more than to steal the warmth from their bones. “Nothing’s changed.”

He can practically hear Keith’s scowl. “I’m going to check,” he insists, and it almost sounds like a challenge. Even if Shiro could fight him on it, he doesn’t think he would. Guilt from the night before gnaws at him and keeps him quiet. So Keith leaves.

Shiro doesn’t stop him.

And so he’s left alone again. Shiro wishes he could at least exercise to fill the time, or even just to generate a little more heat. The thought of moving, though, just sends cold dread radiating down his spine and around to his wound, reminding him that he’s close enough to useless right now. 

Eventually, Keith returns, leans down expectantly for Shiro to grab, and Shiro lets him bring him to the next room. Every touch lasts exactly as long as it needs to, and not a second more. Shiro is deposited at his spot by the fire and left to his own devices. The silence is powerful enough that it keeps Shiro’s voice at bay.

Keith tinkers with the control panel for most of the day. It’s far enough from the fire that Shiro’s left on his own. It’s probably on purpose. Shiro doesn’t blame him; he broke something fragile between them last night, but he’s not sure what it was quite yet. Keith seems to know, though.

The shadows don’t move enough to mark the passage of time. The suits’ systems are fried for the most part; without the chance to charge, they’re going to get useless as far as technological feats are concerned, so it’s not a wise choice to devote the energy reserves to checking the time. It doesn’t matter what the time is, anyway. Whenever the Black Lion wakes up or the storm lets up is when they can fight their way out of this place, and no sooner.

Every little while, Keith curses softly from his spot at the control panel, but he doesn’t ask for Shiro’s opinion and Shiro doesn’t bother offering it.

Shiro shivers, and he’s thankful for the blanket he brought with himself from the bed. He wraps it around his shoulders a bit tighter and tries to make sense of the words on the page he’s inspecting today. He thinks this might be a record of meeting notes; there are clear paragraph breaks with symbols at the beginning that are repetitive between lines, as if the writer is marking who’s talking with a name. Or maybe it’s a script. Maybe it’s light reading for whoever used to be stationed here, a play like the ancient Shakespeare masterpieces they still read back on Earth. 

He’ll figure it out, hopefully. If he can’t even learn a language, will he have succeeded at anything since crashing here?

He can learn. He will.

But learning gets frustrating when you only have one half of the answer key. He can’t do this forever, or it starts to tax his brain to the point that he gets distracted and his synthetic fingers keep dropping the pages. After his fourth time collecting the scattered pieces, he gives up for now.

“Think Pidge can get a signal through this storm?” Shiro asks to fill the silence.

“Maybe,” Keith says. “Hopefully.”

“I’m sure they’re trying.”

Keith pauses in his activity, biting his lip, and then nods. “I’m sure,” he echoes, and he says nothing more.

Shiro doesn’t bother to strike up a new conversation. He’s done enough diplomacy to know that this isn’t the best time.

So they spend the day in silence, and the light fades in time.

Keith comes back that night, though, and he doesn’t sleep on the floor. He urges Shiro closer to the wall and wraps himself around Shiro’s back without an argument. He fits there like he was meant to, and the added security makes it easier to head towards sleep.

“Gotta keep you warm,” he mumbles, and he tucks the blanket in around Shiro like it’ll make any difference. 

The real difference, though, is the body heat.

“I’m glad you decided to come up here,” Shiro admits, glad he’s speaking at the wall instead of looking Keith in the eye.

Behind him, close enough to his ear that Shiro has to repress a shudder, Keith softly replies, “Me too, Shiro.”

 

* * *

 

So they make a habit of it.

 

* * *

 

They wake up together.

Normally, one of them would stir and urge the other into the main room to soak up the heat of the fire after a frigid night. This morning, though, comfort holds them so tightly that Shiro contemplates just falling asleep and letting this warmth drag him into darkness at last. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go, given the circumstances.

Keith doesn’t seem to mind either; he usually stirs first and jostles Shiro into consciousness, but he ends up sighing and tucking his face in beside Shiro’s neck instead of insisting they get moving. His nose is usually cold, and Shiro usually complains, but that has become as much of a routine as waking up, so the complaints never mean much. Besides, Keith always laughs softly against his neck when he does it, because he’s still got a mischievous streak a mile wide and loves making Shiro squirm, and Shiro’s willing to let that happen.

So they tend to get out of bed a bit later, and that helps pass the time.

One of the days, Keith finds some adhesive in one of the drawers. After they decide it’s not good enough to hold the bandages in place, Keith repurposes it to decorate their little frozen haven. He collects the papers that have some of their favorite illustrations and diagrams that they couldn’t bear to burn and brings some of them into the bedroom. Others stay in the main room with the fire. 

That’s where Shiro sits while he watches Keith tack up the files containing the illustrations from the Voltron file. Up there on the wall, they’re fully illuminated by the fire. The flickering flames catch the finer points of the ink that stayed untouched by however many freezing years the file had sat in its cabinet. There must be something luminous in the blue ink, because the lights that mark the paladins’ helmets and shoulders gleam a sparkling turquoise. The detail, though small, has Shiro feeling nostalgic for the times when he’d had the team and worn the armor, and for some reason the memory doesn’t hurt like it usually does. Maybe this is what acceptance feels like. Maybe it’s easier since this is Zarkon’s group instead.

There they are: the paladins of Voltron.

They’re not Shiro’s paladins, but the armor is enough. He can convince himself of it if he tries.

“I miss them,” he says, still staring at the drawing.

“Me too.” Keith smooths the adhesive down a bit more. “How long’s it been?”

They both know how long they’ve been here.

“Long enough,” Shiro replies. As if in response, his injury twinges with pain, reminding him that they’re on a clock. He doesn’t bother saying the real number. The reality of their imprisonment hurts. He repeats, “Long enough.”

“Too long,” Keith says darkly. His voice gains that animal roughness it’s been wearing lately, and far more frequently than ever before. It sticks there, coloring his next question. “It still hurts, doesn’t it?”

Pain has been a part of his existence here for as long as the cold has. Shiro can’t find it in himself to lie for Keith’s sake. “Always does.”

There’s the growl again, and something coils and rises in Shiro’s chest at the sound. Keith shakes his head. If he had a tail like some of the other Blades, it’d surely be lashing. Still, the frustration is undeniable and fills the air with a heaviness that weighs into Shiro’s bones and drives him towards submitting to sleep, but still the warmth burns in his heart and reminds him that Keith’s anger is for his sake. He’s being protected. Keith says, “It’s not going to get any better.”

“Keith.”

“Is it?”

Shiro tries, softly, “Keith, if we just wait-”

“How much longer can we wait until you die, Shiro?” Keith snaps, and his hand clutches at Shiro’s shoulder. His grip is tighter than usual, and five individual spots in Shiro’s skin flare with faint pain. Claws.

“Keith,” Shiro says again. He won’t yell. He won’t fight Keith. Not again. Not ever. “You’re hurting me,” he says. Calmly. Calmly. He won’t fight Keith.

Keith’s violet eyes go wide. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, and he rips his hand away, clenching the fingers into a protective fist close to his own chest. It’s more for Shiro’s sake than Keith’s; Shiro can see the way Keith winces when his claws dig into the palm of his own hand. “I didn’t mean to yell. I just...I dunno.” He hunches in further on himself. “I don’t like that you’re hurting.”

Shiro doesn’t chase him; there’s a suspicion in the back of his mind that says that Keith will shy away from even the gentlest touch. “It’s fine,” he says instead. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.” He barely did, anyway. If anything, the pinpricks of sensation are a pleasant reminder that he’s still living. Lately, there haven’t been enough of those. 

There’s not much more he can say than that, though, and so he leaves their silence to freeze and grow more solid between them.

At last, Keith speaks, and his words echo delicately against metal and frost. “I’m worried about you, Shiro.”

“I know you are.” Shiro scoots over a little bit and pats the ground beside himself in a silent invitation. He waits and watches while Keith hesitates, skirting the edge of the fire’s warmth with wide violet eyes that haven’t quite changed color or shape, but eventually Keith gives in and lowers himself to sit on the ground as well. He’s closer now, not quite touching, but it’s a start and Shiro’s happy to have that. “There’s no point in getting angry about it. Not now. We’re wasting energy with that.”

“It happens a lot more than you’d think.”

“What does?”

“This.” Keith unclenches his fist; a drop of blood runs down one of his gloved fingers and onto the frosted ground. “Do you remember,” he says carefully, “when we were fighting?”

Shiro chuckles, low and mirthless. Of course he remembers. This body has that fight in its bones; it won’t give up the muscle memory of harming Keith anytime soon. “Gonna have to be more specific.”

“Did you see anything? Anything about me?”

“Well.” Shiro sits forward, clasping his hands together. “You sound like you’re already expecting something.” He raises his eyebrows. “Do you want me to guess?”

“No, uh. I’ll say it.” Keith sighs. “The fight. When things got - when they got hard, I looked different. Felt different.”

He knows. He remembers golden eyes blown wide with terror and pain. “Felt Galra,” he murmurs. 

“When I was with my mom, I learned a lot about being like that.” Keith shrugs, hunching his shoulders as he does it, and it’s just like the Keith that first sat in the cockpit of the Black Lion again, sullen and silent. “Being, y’know. Galra. Guess it made it so that I let it out in times like...that.”

“Like that.”

He doesn’t smell flesh burning. He doesn’t hear Keith scream.

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t.

Instead, he asks, “What else did Krolia teach you?”

There’s Keith’s half smile again; his shoulders relax a bit. “How to speak the language. Write it. Read it. She showed me...I dunno. The way the Galra should be?” He looks down at his hands, flexing the fingers idly, and Shiro’s pretty sure he sees claws there. He’s not sure how he didn’t notice them earlier. “I liked what she taught me. I liked what the Galra are, at their core.”

“Something you’d want to be?”

Keith shrugs. “Yeah. I...I think so. The empire distorted a lot of what they’re like. But the core parts that survived - you can see what we used to be. We have a nice language when you know it, y’know?”

“Teach me.” 

“Teach you?”

“Your language.” Shiro leans forward and taps at the floor with his fingers. There’s a bit of residual warmth in the metal that’s seeped over from the fire; he savors the rare pleasure of it while he can. This is a rare good day for him, and the cold isn’t sapping too much of his strength right now, so he’s determined to take advantage of it while he can. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Keith furrows his brow and stares at the ground.

“What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t think you’d ask,” Keith admits softly.

Shiro smiles. “You seem to be excited about it. Why not ask?”

Finally, he’s rewarded with a hint of a grin in return. “Yeah,” Keith says. “Guess so.” He gnaws on his bottom lip and doesn’t meet Shiro’s eyes for a bit. “Trying to think of the right word.”

“Need suggestions?” Even as he asks it, all possible words drain from Shiro’s head, leaving him empty. 

“Nah.” Keith smiles up at him through his hair. “I’ll think of something good.” He furrows his brow, staring off into the distance, and his lips work silently as he tries out words that Shiro can neither hear nor have any chance of understanding. He’s putting an incredible amount of thought into it, and Shiro’s pleasantly surprised by it.

He tries to think of something he could give Keith in return that would be of equal value. What does he have that even comes close to language and culture? What can he offer?

“Okay,” Keith says at last. “I have a good one.”

Shiro raises an eyebrow. “Ready when you are, Professor.”

Redness blooms brighter on Keith’s cheeks, more intensely than what is usually there from the bitter cold of their home. He mutters something incoherent and soft; Shiro can’t tell if it’s in a language he can even understand. He’s too busy looking at the way the flushing of Keith’s cheeks makes him seem healthier and warmer, if only for a moment. In a softer, warmer world, this would be an ideal version of Keith: content and comfortable, embarrassed over some idle joke Shiro’s made.

But they’re trapped five star systems from nowhere, and this will have to be enough.

At last, Keith traces a few symbols into the frost on the floor. Shiro recognizes their shape from Galra fighters and bases they’ve infiltrated and stolen over the years. It’s funny that even like this, drawn on the floor by a finger, they’re still eerily akin to how English letters look in Keith’s handwriting.

“What’s that?” he asks, peering over Keith’s shoulder.

“That,” Keith replies, finishing the odd slashing shape of the final character, “is how you say ‘fly’.”

Shiro frowns at the letters. “Maybe we should start with the basics.” He has no idea how to even begin interpreting this. It’s nothing like Altean.

Keith shrugs. “Guess so. I’m not meant for teaching.”

He’s not, and it’s endearing. Shiro considers telling him as much. Instead, he asks, “Can you still say the word, though?”

The little rumble of Keith’s laugh is a language all its own.

And then Keith speaks a simple word in the Galra tongue, soft and slow, and he repeats it until Shiro can reply back with it. It’s got a cadence that Shiro hadn’t appreciated when he spent almost a year hearing snippets of Galra conversation from his cell. 

For them, this is a fitting first word.

_ Fly. _

 

* * *

 

The good thing about being raised as warriors is that if they know anything, it’s how to follow a routine.

Patterns are inherent to their lives, as sure as heartbeats and the breaths they take and release. Every day spent sitting in the muted sunlight that streams through the windows brings new boredom and less hope. Keith still hasn’t felt anything from the Black Lion, and there’s little to no chance of the Atlas reaching them over the comms in the middle of this storm.

Shiro doesn’t like keeping count of the days, but compulsion drives him to do it anyway. Each day when he wakes, before he chokes down a breakfast of foul alien flesh and tries to ignore his own gradual decay, he spends fifteen minutes carving a tally mark into the wall beside the bed using Keith’s dagger.

Some days, Keith is already gone when Shiro wakes up, off hunting or searching or hiding, and Shiro’s left alone and shivering in the absence of the ritual.

Those days come around less and less.

Privately, even though the infrequency means despair, Shiro’s quietly pleased that he wakes up with someone.

Breakfast is always the same. If they take their time, Shiro and Keith can manage to spend an hour gnawing on stringy roasted cuts from the haunches of the half-frozen cat carcass. They’re lucky that the alien cat is huge and that they’re both familiar with the ways to ration food. A pair of soldiers like them can probably last for at least a few weeks on this alone. Shiro tries not to think about all the other problems they’ll have on their hands if they try to survive on meat alone. Just this and nothing else. Sure, they eradicated nutrition diseases back on Earth, but out here there’s nothing to keep them from succumbing to any manner of illnesses.

Thinking of all the other ways they can die is also a good way to pass the time, even if it’s not the most uplifting.

Investigating the filing cabinets takes a few hours. Shiro, with Keith’s help, sits before the cabinet of his choice and works through the folders he chooses. It’s nice to try to figure out the meaning of the runic language of this planet’s native race, matching it with the occasional figures. Keith sometimes looks over his shoulder and suggests a direction for the narrative. They’re obviously research texts of some variety, but that doesn’t stop them from injecting some fiction into the stories they spin.

Sometimes the stories involve the other paladins. On the bad days, they don’t. It’s too hard to think about them, and of what they’re missing.

On the good days, though, Shiro looks forward to reading through the gibberish and then tossing it into the fire. That’s the rule: find some meaning in the paper before turning it to ash.

Keith checks on the wound twice a day.

For good reason, too: the swelling hasn’t gone down the way it should, and the gashes still leak fresh blood if they’re prodded too much. With every check up where Keith’s fingers come away bloody, the hard steely look in Keith’s eyes gets harder to ignore.

“As long as it doesn’t get infected, we should be fine.”

Keith’s taken to saying that a lot more lately. 

Shiro nods. “Any day now.”

He says that a lot more too.

It’s part of the sad routine they’ve fallen into, because apparently the greatest constant over their long years together is that one of them is always hurting. The familiarity of dancing around their own pain to spare the other has long since become second nature. Shiro can hardly feel the pain of the injury; he’s so used to it by now that maybe he’s starting to believe the numbness.

Patterns. It’s all a pattern.

As with all things, they get better at following the routine with practice. Shiro tells Keith as much as they go through the motions of acting like this is just some regular check up in the infirmary. “You’re getting good at this.”

“Wish I was better.” Keith slashes his dagger across the length of the new bandage with a little bit more zeal than intended. “You’d be healthy by now.” The bandage has more frayed edges than Keith intended, probably. It’ll do the job.

Shiro shakes his head. “You’re doing the best you can.” And far more than he should be doing. In a situation like this, it’s best to cut his losses and leave Shiro behind for his own sake. Shiro knows enough about Marmora operatives and their training to understand that Keith’s violating most mission directives by devoting time and resources to a lost cause.

Neither of them is quite willing to call him that, though. Shame chokes Shiro each time, mingling with the blood he perpetually feels at the back of his throat.

This is the new normal. This is the pattern.

Keith knows how to soothe away the predictable aches before they start. As he unwraps the blood-soaked bandage, Shiro gasps at the change in pressure and the way that the wound threatens to send more blood flowing down his side. If it does, he’ll get more blood caked in beneath his undersuit, and that’ll just make things worse. It could hasten the progression of any possible infection. But if he keeps still for just a bit longer, then Keith will wash the wound and wrap it up again and they can forget about it until the next check up.   

Because that’s all they have now, isn’t it? They’re just measuring time by the increasing fragility of this body that was never Shiro’s to begin with. 

And they’re probably going to be stuck here forever, and Keith’s not going to leave him behind even if there’s a chance of him surviving on his own. It’s stupid and noble and it’s exactly what Keith does, and Shiro hates that he’s such a good person.

He clenches his fists and doesn’t realize that he’s shaking until his jaw starts aching. 

“Hey.” Keith’s fingers retreat from the wound and settle at the crests of Shiro’s hip bones, gently holding him down. “Shiro.” He rubs slow circles against the bone there, spreading warmth along Shiro’s skin.

Shiro shakes his head. His cheeks are burning, which is a shock of its own when it’s so cold. All of his blood should be in his core. Or leaking from his wound onto his skin. Both of those options seem logical given the situation. 

It  _ hurts. _

“Shiro?” Keith asks again. How can he be so quiet and calm? “Are you okay?”

Shiro sniffs. 

His eyes are burning now too, and the warmth on his cheeks has turned liquid and uneven. Shiro sniffs again, squeezing his eyes shut, and wants nothing more than to run away from this shack in the middle of the frozen wasteland. Keith doesn’t need to see him cry. Keith doesn’t need to go feeling sorry for him. Shiro’s doing that plenty for the both of them.

He’s fine. He’s fine.

Quickly, he raises his shaking left hand and swipes the tears from his cheeks before they can continue their icy trek down his face. “I’m good,” he says. “I’m good. Don’t worry about it.”

Keith’s eyes could melt him, probably. Shiro’s all ice and blood and bone, held in place by the cold of this endless winter. “Shiro, you don’t have to-”

“Wouldn’t you feel the same?” Shiro snaps. “If you were-”

_ Useless- _

“Shiro.”

No. Shiro shakes his head and wraps his fingers around each of Keith’s wrists; his hands are still holding him by the hip bones. He thinks he might feel the warmth of his own blood on Keith’s fingers. “I think I just need some time. The bandages are fine.” He lifts Keith’s hands from his skin and pushes them away. 

“Shiro-”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t - don’t apologize.” Keith stands and stares down at his bloodstained fingers, then at Shiro. Shiro ducks his head, cheeks still burning, and doesn’t meet his gaze. Mercifully, Keith just says, “I’ll go.”

Shiro nods. “Thank you,” he manages. His voice still aches around the tears in his throat. It hurts to keep them at bay; he knows the sobs will hurt more if he lets them out.

Keith takes another long look at him, hard enough that Shiro can’t ignore the fiery weight of his gaze, but he doesn’t say a word and goes into the main room. He leaves the door open, though, and for that Shiro’s thankful; the fire is in the other room during the day hours, and he needs the heat. He settles down somewhere around the corner, out of Shiro’s reach, and other than the quiet spitting of the flames, there are no further sounds from the main room. 

This is too much.

Shiro curls in on himself to try to lessen the agony. The blankets don’t do much to chase away the cold without another body there to warm him. He’s gotten spoiled ever since Keith started sharing the bed, and now he can’t imagine feeling warm without him. 

Is this what would have happened to him if he’d stayed behind on Earth so long ago? Would he have turned into this eventually, confined to bed unless he had someone to help him? From his bed, he wouldn’t be able to see the sky or the stars. There would’ve been nothing to discover on Earth. Nothing impossible.

If he’d stayed on Earth, Keith would have graduated and made it to the stars. He would have done the impossible.

And he would have left Shiro behind.

Shiro leans his head back against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut. Even attempting to sigh makes him ache. This feeling is familiar, at least, and it’s preferable to the tears. He’s not sure he could handle the pain of the wracking sobs that threaten to tear through his body like a storm.

He sinks into the dull pain, and into the easy monotony of it, and waits for time to pass.

It does. Slowly, icily, the day wears on, and Shiro lets it happen around him.

Not even the thought of distant stars excites him.

At some point, he comes back to himself and sees Keith watching him from the doorway. “Hey,” he says, surprising himself with the rasp in his throat.

“Feeling better?” Keith’s wearing his gloves again. He comes over and passes Shiro a cup full of warm water; it’s just melted snow that he’s warmed up over the fire, but it fills Shiro with a comfortable ease when he wraps his hands around the metal tin. 

“Yeah. Thanks.” Shiro taps his metal finger on the side of the cup, testing out the different notes he can get it to make, before he says, “Hey. I’m sorry about breaking down. I know this is hard for you too.”

“I just want to make sure you’re okay, Shiro. We’re stuck here. The least I can do while we wait is keep you comfortable.”

Shiro shakes his head. “You could be getting yourself out of here.”

Swiftly, Keith recoils, and his brows furrow in obvious concern. “Shiro,” he says, “I’m not gonna leave you behind.”

He sighs. “I know.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You-” There are so many things he could say about Keith. There are so many things that he could mean. He goes for simple fact first, because he’s always found solace in the certainty of constants. The speed of light, the rush of taking off from the surface of a planet, the magnitude of Keith’s wrath when he is defending others: these are all constants. Their unshaking nature soothes him to sleep more often than not these days. He voices one of them that he usually tries not to think about for too long, lest he start obsessing. “Keith, you’re always prepared to throw yourself away for me.” And that’s in the most literal of terms. He still remembers seeing it through the Black Lion’s eyes: Keith, falling away into starlight with the clone’s hand in his.

Keith narrows his eyes. “So what if I am?”

“Maybe we should talk about this.” He’s been meaning to for ages. Maybe this is the right time.

“This?”

He’s avoiding the question. Shiro says, “This. The fight. That day.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

Shiro raises an eyebrow. “Nothing.”

“Nothing.”

So Keith wants them to forget this. He wants them to ignore what happened in the facility when both of them remember burning. Shiro certainly will never be able to forget the way this body had been piloted at the mercy of a witch’s whims, and how the arm had turned into a weapon at the expense of his flesh. He doesn’t want to forget it. He can’t, or nobody will remember all the harm he’s done.

How can Keith be so willing to forget about how much Shiro’s hurt him?

And how can he expect Shiro to forget what he said?

_ Shiro, please- _

“Keith,” he tries again, a little raggedly, because his voice is fighting past the memory of  _ Just let go, Keith. _

Keith shakes his head. “You’re-”

_ -my brother- _

“-not looking good. I don’t want to strain you.” Keith puts his hand on Shiro’s shoulder. Shiro tries so hard not to press into the touch like the desperate, starving thing he becomes when Keith’s around, but instinct still drives him up towards the warmth of Keith’s hand. Keith says, “Shiro, I’m gonna...go.”

_ Go?  _ “Where?” he asks. Not outside; he’ll freeze out there.

“Just the other room. I think we need some time.” 

“We?”

Keith flinches. “Or I do, at least,” he corrects softly. He withdraws from Shiro’s reach and goes for the door. He’s far enough that Shiro can’t just lever himself upwards and follow him; all he can do is watch Keith leave.

But he still has his voice.

“You told me you loved me.”

Keith stops in the doorway; his fingers curl around the doorjamb like a lifeline. His other hand, hanging at his side, curls into a fist. “I did.” Maybe Shiro’s imagining it, but that stubborn Keith certainty sounds a little like pride. Like a challenge.

What’s he going to do with that?

Mouth dry, he asks, “Did you mean it?”

Because it could have been a ploy. It could have just been something to try to snap the clone out of his haze. Keith's feelings could have changed after Shiro came back from the heart of the Black Lion.

Keith is silent.

Shiro bows his head. The answer’s clear enough; he’s not going to drag it out of Keith.

_ I love you. _

At least he still has the memory. The cold can’t take that from him.

Before Keith’s footsteps retreat into the next room, though, Shiro hears a quiet, broken murmur of his own name, and that hurts more.

He stares at the day’s papers and tries to think of a story to tell.

Nothing comes to mind.

All he can think, over and over, is that he would have meant it if he’d had the chance to say it back.

“Shiro,” Keith says that night, sitting on the edge of the bed.

Shiro looks over his shoulder. Keith’s posture is far from relaxed; his head hangs down towards his chest. But he’s stripped down for the night, wearing only his body suit and gloves. His hair is tousled from the drafts that make it through the faulty windows of this ancient sanctuary. “Yeah?”

For a few long moments, Keith doesn’t speak. He just breathes, in and out and in again, and without his armor to illuminate the room, the clouds that prove he’s living go unseen. After a minute, he raises his head to stare at the ceiling. “I just wanted to say…” He trails off. “I dunno.”

It’s a long shot, but Shiro holds out his hand and finds Keith’s shoulder. “You can tell me anything,” he says. “You know that.” Keith’s already told him the most important thing. Shiro will hold on to that for the rest of his life, however long that may be. They don’t have to talk about it; clearly Keith doesn’t want to.

“I’m glad I got you back,” he finally says.

Something warm and satisfied settles in Shiro’s heart. He draws from it, breathing his relief into his reply. “I’m glad you got me back.” Glad he’s Keith’s for a little while longer. 

Keith huffs out a small laugh, but there’s not much of a smile curling his lips. When he turns to get in bed with Shiro, though, there’s something warm in his eyes. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.” And then he’s close enough to touch, and then he’s wrapping himself around Shiro like it’s his job - it is - and slings his arm into place at Shiro’s side. He’s still carrying the chill of the rest of the building and the endless winter with him, and Shiro shivers in the first moments. “You’re cold,” Keith tells him.

“Warm me up, then,” Shiro replies.

Keith’s arm tightens around his waist. “I’m trying,” he mumbles, burying his face in the back of Shiro’s neck like he usually does in the morning. His nose is freezing; he’s probably just trying to warm it up. Shiro grumbles about it, but Keith shushes him softly, and Shiro can’t argue with that.

And Keith does keep him warm.

Shiro’s too restless to sleep for some reason. The exhaustion of keeping his own body warm should be enough to lull him into slumber like it always does, but his mind is still racing. Shiro lets his eyes slip shut, and that’s enough of a relief on its own that he’s nearly sleeping, but he doesn’t quite take the plunge into the void yet.

Apparently, he’s not the only one.

The sigh that Keith lets out against his neck is not one that someone makes in his sleep. Shiro’s shares rooms with Keith enough times to know the intricacies of his sounds. The careful categorization started when he was on nightmare watch; he learned during their time flying towards Earth that Keith’s nightmares end when someone hears his quiet cries and sits by his side. This isn’t that. This is something conscious. Something softer.

So Shiro waits.

Keith murmurs something into his hair. He’s speaking so softly that Shiro almost doesn’t hear him, but the sound resonates in a hushed music to his ears. Private. Special. It’s a word.

Just one.

Maybe Shiro’s heard it once before, but it’s in the language of the Galra, and their lessons haven’t brought it up. Still, though, it sounds important, and the quiet cautiousness of it confirms his suspicion that Keith must think he’s fast asleep. He’s not meant to hear this. 

But he does. He does.

Shiro tries to form the shape of it with his lips, soundless in the frigid air, and decides that he won’t forget how Keith’s voice sounded.

He falls asleep when his breathing has fallen into rhythm with Keith’s.

 

* * *

 

He dreams of lions, and of golden eyes.

 

* * *

 

Their lessons continue when Shiro’s feeling up to talking.

Over the days, he has more and more periods when he can’t do much more than lie beneath the blankets and repress his shivering. Though he knows that shivering is his body’s way of warming itself up, every rogue shudder aggravates the pain of his injury. It’s not closing up the way it should be by now. He should have gotten stitches ages ago, and it turns out that bandages are a poor substitute. At least they’re keeping pressure on the wound. 

The good days, though, bring more time sitting at the fire. After Shiro finishes his early morning carving of a new tally mark in the wall, Keith helps him into the main room and settles him down at the fire. He brings Shiro files from the top cabinets that Shiro can’t quite reach so that he can go through them to find information or a good story before using the papers for fuel. After lunch, they’re usually in a good enough mood that Keith is willing to stop his restless pacing and sit down beside Shiro at the fire. He traces letters and symbols into the frost on the floor and speaks their meanings aloud. Sometimes they’re just odd nouns here and there. Sometimes Keith tries to explain the finer points of verb conjugation, but Shiro was always the better teacher between the two of them, and Keith stumbles a bit. 

The lessons are enjoyable nonetheless. Shiro likes trying to focus on what he’s taught, and the easy emptiness of repetition keeps him occupied when Keith tries to venture out into the wilderness and leave him alone. Without the connection to the Black Lion or to the Atlas, though, his mind is too empty and quiet when he’s on his own in their metal home. 

But it’s worth it when Keith comes back in and Shiro shows him what he’s learned while Keith warms his hands at the fire. Each time, even if Shiro only repeats a word or two back at him, Keith looks proud.

Today, Keith is trying to make him understand the finer points of possessive words. The Galra don’t have the functional equivalent of apostrophes, so there’s a whole set of words to learn. Shiro will be the first to admit that he’s forgotten half of the words already, but then again the heat of the fire makes his head a little light as it is, so he can’t be blamed.

“Are you even listening?” Keith teases, elbowing him.

Shiro snorts, “Absolutely.” He grasps at his short-term memory and comes up with the word for ‘yours’ just so he can say it back in Keith’s face.

Keith looks impressed in an indulgent, amused way. “Your pronunciation is shit.”

“It’s a dialect.”

“That’s what we’re calling it now?” Keith pokes at the fire with his dagger. “One more?”

Might as well. They’ve nothing else to do, after all. Shiro nods.

One more turns into two, and then into three, and Shiro finds himself enjoying the passage of time. The unchanging light shines down on them from the windows, shedding a white dullness on their little session. This work fills the part of him that’s always hungry for more knowledge, more experiences, and more life. And here’s another thing to be thankful for: Keith brought him back for this. They crashed for this. Would they ever have been able to do this if-

Wait.

Keith’s dictation of words snaps him back into awareness. That word-

The word for ‘my’ sounds familiar.

Shiro tilts his head to the side when Keith repeats it.

There it is again: familiarity. Like warmth at his back and rhythmic breaths against his neck. It sounds like something tender he’s intruding on, turning every bad memory of the Galra language on its head. 

It sounds like Keith in the dead of night.

Sounds like he was trying to say-

“Keith,” he ventures, heart pounding in his chest. His blood rushes in a roar through his ears. If his body weren’t so occupied with keeping itself warm, he’s sure he’d be going red in the cheeks. “How do you say ‘mine’?”

Keith freezes.

Shiro bites his lip. So he was right. He heard that. Keith called him-

_ Mine. _

Softly, Keith says it, so quietly that the syllables are lost.

“Say it again.”

There’s that hesitation again. Keith knows that he knows. Shiro just had to open his mouth and ruin things again.

But Keith repeats it, and the familiarity of its music warms Shiro to the core. His eyes are wide and full of starlight.

Shiro doesn’t connect the dots. Not aloud. He’s already gone too far.

“Shiro,” Keith tries. His voice wavers. Is he going to try to explain it away?

“Yeah?” He won’t run from it. He deserves whatever retribution he gets from this.

But when Keith opens his mouth again, no sound comes out. He slowly closes his mouth and breathes out instead of speaking; his breath curls in a gentle fog away from them. Once more, it’s as if he’s at the helm of the Red Lion again, breathing fire instead of light. But it’s just Keith, breathing life instead of destruction, and there’s no war here. Not between them. 

There’s just…whatever this is.

Keith turns his head to the side, and the right side of his face is bared to the light. The scar stands out in stark relief, and Shiro feels the urge to touch and explore and atone.

“Can I?” he breathes. He doesn’t explain; he hopes Keith will understand. Maybe it’s easier to think about this than the word hovering between them.

_ Mine. _

Keith stares at him sidelong - a prey animal in a corner - but there’s no fear this time. He nods, just barely, like he too has been frozen into submission.

So Shiro reaches out with the hand still made of flesh and bone, and he touches the scar. He’s gentle about it, and Keith doesn’t flinch away.

There’s no sound but Shiro’s heartbeat in his own ears. They’re both holding their breath.

“I gave you this,” he says into their silence. “Or he did. It’s all the same thing. All this body.”

This body. Broken and bleeding and breaking down. Maybe that’s what this injury is: penance.

Keith’s starlight eyes slip shut. “Shiro,” he says again, as if that’s the only word he can manage. As if he’s not fluent in other languages, and like he didn’t use one of them to hold Shiro close and call him  _ mine. _

Shiro traces the line of the scar and imagines it cast in violet instead of brown. If Keith had inherited the markings of his mother, maybe he’d have symmetrical stripes here instead of a mark that nearly blinded him. Still, Keith has pulled dignity from the wound. He takes pride in the scar despite its violent origin.

Unprompted, Shiro’s heart conjures a word that he’s not had the chance to silence. “Beautiful,” he murmurs, and Keith shivers beneath his touch.

How can Keith be anything but that?

The pain of his injuries falls away. It’s just Keith. Just them. 

“What is this?” Keith asks, and there’s that tremor again, like he’s come unmoored from safe harbor.

Shiro considers it. There was something dangerously close to fear in Keith’s voice. Too much about this is wrong. 

He dares to indulge himself, just this once, because all he can think about is foreign words whispered inches from his ear and the dream of the black and red paladins on the cliff in that drawing, together like they could be. Should be. Would be, if he just did something.

So he asks, softly, “How do you say ‘ours’?”

Keith’s eyes open once more, darker than before and still full of every nebula Shiro will ever see, and he smiles.

And he tells Shiro how to say it.

This word is more beautiful than the last.

Shiro commits it to memory. 

He thinks he might hear it whispered into his ear that night.

This time, Keith holds him closer than before.

Their fingers brush once, in the night. Shiro wakes at the touch and stares at their hands in the soft blue light of his dormant arm, studying the faint hints of claw tips on Keith’s gloved fingers, and he murmurs that first word just to try it out. 

_ Mine. _

Unfamiliar on his tongue, the language of the Galra is hard to form, but Shiro repeats the word until it’s right. It’s just barely above a whisper, quiet enough that it shouldn’t wake Keith up. He can barely hear it himself.

It sounds nice.

Carefully, he wraps one of his fingers around Keith’s outstretched thumb.

Just to try it.

Keith doesn’t respond in any way; the rhythm of his breathing remains unchanged against Shiro’s back. No muscles twitch to betray his wakefulness; he’s either asleep, or he’s a very good liar. Shiro’s indulgence is a secret tonight.

He thinks of the paladins on the cliff. He thinks of  _ ours.  _

Those are dangerous waters. That’s not something he should consider for too long.

It was irresponsible of him to encourage this.

Shiro stares at their clasped fingers for another long, long moment. He commits the image to memory.

This is a good one. He’ll cherish this one for however long he has left.

He lets go.

The cold air rushes in between his fingers to chase away the warmth of Keith’s touch.

Behind him, Keith makes a soft, distressed noise, and he burrows closer to Shiro in his sleep. Shiro squeezes his eyes shut against a fresh wave of tears. He’s made his decision; now isn’t the time to go back. 

This is for the best.

 

* * *

 

He dreams of lions falling from the stars.


	4. Chapter 4

This is one of the bad days.

He knows it the moment he wakes.

The shivers that have come to accompany his waking are more violent this time, even with Keith still at his side. His body makes a valiant attempt to warm itself through the sheer force of motion, and it self destructs in the process. Shiro gasps when his fractured ribs and slashed side lance with pain in unison. He squeezes his eyes shut to ward off the imminent tears. It’s pointless, though. The tears will fall whether he likes it or not.

“Shiro?” Keith asks, soft against the back of his neck, and the tears grow more insistent. Keith’s too good to him.

“Dagger,” he rasps, and Keith presses the hilt into his palm without a word. Shiro raises his hand and curses when he realizes it’s trembling. Nothing is working the way it should. He lifts the dagger to press the point against the wall. If he can manage nothing else today, he needs to at least continue the pattern. There needs to be a record of how long they’ve been here.

“Let me help.” Keith’s hand wraps around his gently. He guides Shiro’s hands back to the wall, adjusting their combined grip on his knife.

It’s not just Keith’s dagger anymore. It’s-

_ Ours. _

No.

Shiro pushes the word out of his mind. It’s not right. He’s not going to drag Keith to death along with him. Keith can’t tie himself to a man who has died and is dying and will die again.

There’s just this, and the sure scrape of the knifepoint on the wall, and the knowledge that they’re another day closer to something big.

That’s enough. It has to be enough.

It doesn’t take fifteen minutes the way it normally should.

This time, it lasts for not nearly long enough; Keith’s brutally efficient in everything he does, and he helps Shiro through his routine just a bit too well. The officer in him quietly appreciates Keith’s aid and the comparatively straight line they’ve etched into the wall together among all the others. The scared, aching part of him that finds solace in patterns wishes that they could have done it right this time. It needs to take fifteen minutes.

Keith can stay with him for that long, though, and maybe that can make up for it.

“Okay, I’m going to go check on the fire,” Keith says in his ear, close enough that his cool lips lend Shiro a bit of warmth. He rolls over and gets to his feet; Shiro hears the quiet  _ pop  _ of one of his joints as he stretches before padding into the next room.

Shiro wants to protest. 

He shouldn’t.

But he misses Keith’s touch already.

He bears its loss silently and feels the cold creeping in to fill the space where Keith once was. It’s a horrible substitute, and Shiro curls away from it; the only option, it seems, is shivering.

But Keith comes back.

He settles back down on the bed with some meat and a cup of water in his hands. “You’re going to need to sit up or you’ll choke,” he tells Shiro quietly. “Can I help you up?” When Shiro nods, dumbfounded, Keith offers him a small half-smile, something softer than Shiro’s known for all the time he’s spent in this place of ice and metal. Keith guides him up from lying down and helps prop him up against the wall, ensuring that Shiro’s maintained his balance, wobbly as it may be. His touches linger a little longer, maybe. Shiro knows patterns, and he knows Keith’s actions in this cabin like he knows himself, and Keith is acting out of the ordinary. Something’s changed for him, and Shiro’s heart hurts when he thinks about it. Something is different with Keith. It’s hard to name: Keith smiles at him, just a half-grin in truth, but it’s more than Shiro ever thought he’d get when they’re riding the knife edge of survival together. 

Keith doesn’t deserve this.

He should be back up in the stars, fighting for every creature he loves, every soul he’s never met but would still sacrifice himself for. That’s Keith at his best: a burning star. He was never meant to be grounded; was never meant to be snowbound. 

But he lets Keith hand him breakfast and a cup of melted snow, and he murmurs a quiet  _ thank you  _ with a smile that he hopes reaches his eyes. He pauses, watching Keith’s expression, and repeats the thanks in the Galra language.

Keith’s eyes widen, and so does his grin. He nudges Shiro’s shoulder with his own, murmurs, “Well done,” and hides his smile in a bite of smoked meat. It’s a bit too late for that, of course; Shiro knows he saw that. “Just need to clean up the pronunciation.”

“We’ll get there.” Shiro curls a bit closer to the wall for the support it offers. “A few more hours of practice and I’ll get it right.”

“I know you will.” Keith stares at Shiro as he finishes his last bite of food. He chews, considering, and scowls a bit. The disappearance of the smile is almost disappointing. “You’re shivering.”

“I’m not.”

He is.

Keith picks up one of the blankets and wraps it around Shiro’s shoulders. “Stop lying. I thought we were past that.”

“Neither of us are well-known for being cooperative.”

“Got me there.” Keith takes the empty cup from Shiro’s hand after Shiro has done his best to wash down the stringy remnants of their breakfast. “Warm enough?”

“Mostly, yeah.” He hesitates. This isn’t what he should be doing; he should be maintaining his distance. He should be trying to think of ways to get them out of there; instead, he swallows down all his intentions and lets his instincts ask, “D’you think you could join me?”

Keith’s head tilts to the side. “Yeah. ‘Course, Shiro.” He scoots a bit closer in the bed, lifting his feet up onto the mattress as well. He reaches out an arm, and his fingers play along the frayed edge of the blanket he’s already wrapped around Shiro’s shoulders. Softly, he clears his throat. “Um.”

His fingers are warm, even through the suit. Shiro glances at him out of the corner of his eye. “Sorry?” Maybe he’s apologizing, though he’s not sure what for.

“Can’t really keep you warm if you’re all the way over there.” Keith tugs gently at Shiro’s shoulder. “C’mere,” he urges, and he maneuvers Shiro into his arms.

Shiro goes willingly.

Keith’s chest is strong and unyielding against his back. It reminds Shiro of just how much they’ve changed since this whole mess began. But maybe it’s always been like this, since Shiro came plummeting down to Earth in a stolen ship and stumbled back into Keith’s life. Keith was always like this; it just took Shiro too long to figure out, and he almost lost him time and time again. Shiro’s only ever repaid his strength with violence and pain.

But still, Keith lends him his strength, and Shiro can’t figure out why.

Just this once. Just this one last time. He’ll let himself have this, and then that’ll be it. 

It doesn’t sound very convincing when his mind parrots it back to him in his own voice. It sneers, sounds like the imposter, like the person who died trying to tear Keith apart. Shiro scowls at everything and nothing, ignores his mental self’s scorn, and tries to find warmth in Keith’s embrace. Though he’s only just woken up, sleep tugs at him and urges him back into darkness. It’s just that he’s so comfortable. It won’t hurt if he drifts off again.

Above him, around him, Keith hums in a bit of a sigh. He sounds comfortable. Shiro doesn’t want to disturb him right now, so maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if he let himself fall asleep in his arms.

The darkness takes him, and this time he lets it in gladly.

He opens his eyes to the world outside their metal prison. He opens his eyes to the storm.

_ “Hey, Shiro?” Keith asks, standing before him in the swirling, featureless whiteness. The storm steals away all of the color in his suit, sapping the blue light from the armor and the violent red accents.  _

_ Shiro stumbles forward, but the wind screams at him, and he screams back, falling to his knees. The cold should be numbing him, but still he struggles to find a breath that doesn’t send him spiraling into agony. The rushing air pulls at his wound and rips the blood from his side, throwing it across the space between them and onto the muted, starved white of Keith’s armor. _

_ “It’s cold,” Keith mumbles. He staggers towards Shiro, hand outstretched, but he doesn’t quite make it. _

_ “Keith!” Shiro cries, but Keith’s turning to snow; the white and grey of his armor merge with the blizzard and become the snow. There’s no solidity to him. _

_ The storm pulls him away, away, away, and Shiro’s blinded by it all.  _

The whiteness flares bright white, the dream ends, and Shiro jerks to awareness.

He blinks, and the light seems different in here. The ache in his side has returned, worse than before, and his eyes struggle to open all the way, weighed down by something more than a sudden exhaustion. He mutters, “How long was I asleep?” His voice rasps like he’s been screaming.

“Hour or so. Maybe longer.” Behind him, Keith shifts and readjusts his grip. He’s still holding Shiro so close. It’s like he hasn’t moved at all since Shiro drifted off. “Hard to keep track.”

“Right.” Against his will, he shudders, and this time his whole body seizes with the force of it. He bites back a swear at the shock and hides it with all of the other things he’s keeping frozen down. “Sorry that I kept you here.”

Keith makes a vague noise, void of words in any of his languages. Shiro’s not sure what it means for someone who knows so many words to be at a loss.  “I want to be here with you. You know that.” There’s something in his voice that Shiro can identify, at least in broad strokes. Something fond. Something dangerously affectionate.

Shiro swallows around the pain of  _ We shouldn’t do this  _ in his throat. 

“Hey, Keith?”

“Yeah, Shiro?”

“It’s really cold.”

Keith sighs and wraps his arms more tightly around Shiro. “I’m sorry I can’t do more. If I could just get Black to wake up…”

Shiro shakes his head. This isn’t Keith’s fault. He can’t go blaming himself for a storm outside of his control. “You’re doing the best you can. I need to thank you.”

“You don’t.”

“I  _ do,”  _ he insists. Again, more firmly, he repeats, “I do.”

Behind him, Keith huffs out a ghost of a laugh that sends a frost-white cloud spiraling into the room. “You know that I’d do anything if it meant keeping you alive, you know that?”

Maybe the cold is getting to him too, forcing the words out like frank, blunt instruments to shatter Shiro’s careful barriers of ice. They’re hastily built, anyway, and they don’t stand a chance against the force of Keith’s honesty. Shiro nods. “I know,” he says. How could he not, when Keith has given everything to bring Shiro back from the brink, time and time again? How could he not, when his ears still ring with the promise of  _ ours?  _ “I know.”

“Then you know I’ll never stop trying to do more for you.”

He might not be in his right mind. He’s definitely not. That doesn’t stop words from tumbling from his frost-numbed lips, desperate and slurred. “I missed this.”

Keith hums and carefully readjusts the blanket around Shiro’s shoulders. “What? You almost dying?”

Shiro shakes his head. It’s hard to keep his eyes open. He lets them slip shut and mumbles, “No. You holdin' me.”

The silence stretches on for ages.

It cracks, too loud and too soft, with the sharp inhale of Keith’s breath, and with the answering whisper of “Shiro.”

It’s a nice sound. Shiro’d wrap himself in it if he could. Keith’s arms are good for now, though. More than good. More than enough. “It’s the truth,” he admits. “I missed this. Missed you.” He turns and shifts until he’s facing Keith, half-kneeling and half-sitting on the bed between Keith’s legs. 

Keith looks almost pained. “I missed you too, Shiro,” he says, and his voice wavers.

“Good.” He smiles. “That’s good.” Good. Good.

He’s so cold.

“You’re gonna be okay.” Keith’s still holding him close. “Shiro, d’you hear me? You’re going to be okay.”

Shiro laughs, or tries to. To avoid the pain, all he can manage is a single breath that might have a bit of joy. “My hero,” he murmurs, and he means it.

Keith’s close enough to be a dangerous temptation. His eyes have long since slipped shut, and still Shiro can’t stop looking at him. There’s an irresistible beauty in the sweep of Keith’s dark eyelashes, and in the barely parted curve of his lips. “Shiro,” he murmurs, and he leans in close, pressing their heads together. 

Shiro lets out a shuddering sigh; he can’t control it when Keith is this close. 

He pulls back and holds Keith by the shoulder, squeezing gently until Keith opens his eyes. They’re a darker violet than Shiro remembers them being, unfathomable like the deep seas on planets unknown and unnamed. The old yearning in Shiro’s chest longs to explore them. But there’s something he needs to ask first. Business. He’s the captain of the Atlas for however long he has left, and that’s more important than indulging his own selfishness.

“Keith, if I don’t make it out of here, I need-“

“What’re you gonna try to give me this time?”

Shiro furrows his brow. “What?”

Keith’s voice rasps out to him, soft in the tiny distance between them. “Every time you think you’re dying, you try to give me things. After that first fight with Zarkon, when we were stranded, you told me you wanted me to lead Voltron if you died.”

How is it that Keith knows him so well? He’d thought that he wasn’t so predictable. But he admits, “I was gonna say, actually...about the Atlas.”

The soft glow of Keith’s eyes disappears as he slips his eyes shut, letting out a sigh. The disappointment is almost palpable in the way his body loses all its tension, sagging in defeat more than comfort. Raggedly, Keith says, “Shiro, you’re not going to die out here.”

“But if I do-”

“You won’t.” Keith’s hand finds his left arm, squeezing it tightly. “You won’t.”

“How do you know?” He doesn’t know. He should. He’s the captain; he should have all of the answers. Helplessness is unfamiliar and terrifying. Even in the arena, he’d had the choice to keep fighting. In this box of steel and sadness, there’s nothing to do but accept that they’re trapped.

Simply, softly, Keith replies, “Because I won’t let you.”

Unshakable. That’s Keith, of course. He’s always followed a compass of instinct and willpower. When did Shiro lose that? When did he come unmoored from the world?

“Keith.”

“I can only be your successor so many times, y’know?”

Shiro insists, “I know you can do it.” Of course he could. He stepped into the role of the black paladin better than Shiro had ever hoped, and he’d surely be a good fit for the captain of the Atlas. He’s the most competent person Shiro’s ever met. If anyone can take his place, it’s Keith.

“Sure, maybe I can, but…” Keith trails off, catching his bottom lip between his teeth. 

“But what, Keith?”

“I don’t want to always be replacing you. I’m not you. I can’t be you.”

“You can be what I can’t be,” Shiro insists gently.

“But I don’t want to!” Keith snaps.

“Keith, sometimes you have to keep things in perspective-”

Keith rips his hand out of Shiro’s grasp and stands, and his eyes flare golden. “I want to keep  _ you,  _ Shiro!”

What?

Shiro’s heart stumbles and stops.

“Keith,” he says dumbly, because that’s all he can manage, and the word starts his heart racing again.

“I want you, Shiro,” Keith repeats, quietly this time, and his voice nearly disappears into the muffled howl of the storm outside. “I thought you knew that.”

But Shiro won’t always be around. He’s let Keith down more times than he can count. “I can’t give you what you want,” he tells Keith, mouth dry. He can’t be the Shiro that gave Keith a second chance and invited him to join the Galaxy Garrison. He can’t be the Shiro that Keith thought he was saving.

It’s easier this way.

Keith deserves better.

“You don’t know what I want,” Keith protests.

“I can guess well enough.” Shiro stares up at Keith, and he tries to say  _ sorry  _ with his eyes because his mouth can’t manage it. Not in English, at least. He wishes Keith had been able to teach him how to say it in Galra. “And I know it’s not me.”

Quietly, Keith asks, “What happened to  _ ours?”  _

The language of Keith’s people sounds more natural in his voice, and this time when he says their word it sounds more like a weapon than a promise. 

“I don’t know what it was,” Shiro stammers. Except he does know, and he knows it was wrong. A fantasy. A fever dream. The hope of a dying man. “I don’t know,” he repeats.

Though there’s only silence and the constant low scream of the storm, Shiro can practically hear the air freezing over between them.

Finally, with a steady sureness that’s out of place in the blizzard, Keith says, “I’m going to go try to send another signal.”

“You can’t.”

Another flare of gold, and Keith’s lip curls. “Gonna stop me?”

Shiro sags in defeat. “You know I can’t.”

For a second, he sees the regret and apology brew in Keith’s violet-gold eyes, but there’s still betrayal holding his jaw tense. “I know.” He turns and heads for the door.

“Keith, the storm-“

“It’s just a storm. Just like it was yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.” Keith doesn’t even look over his shoulder to throw the words at him; they come to Shiro as an echo off metal walls instead. The soft ringing only makes Keith’s voice sound more hollow. “Nothing about that is going to change, no matter how much you want it to.”

Shiro struggles to sit up. “Keith,” he tries again. “Keith, it’s not safe.”

Keith stops short. The stark, stiff line of his shoulders only further betrays his anger. “Do you think I can’t do it?” he asks quietly. Somehow, the cold rage is louder than if he were to shout. Keith isn’t quiet.

“I know you can,” Shiro says. “You can do anything.” He can. He can. He forced death to release its grip on Shiro’s soul. He doesn’t take no for an answer.

But this time, Keith just laughs. It’s short and breathless and achingly sad, and he replies, “Not anything. We don’t always get what we want.”

There’s nothing Shiro can say to that. He thought he’d known. He’d thought he’d understood where the two of them stand.

Keith reaches back and draws his dagger with practiced ease. His grip’s all wrong. He’s holding it too tightly; a child would be able to disarm him, surely.

There are some constants Shiro trusts. So many of them revolve around Keith. Keith is stubborn. Keith is a fighter. He has pride and he is spiteful and he never backs down from a challenge. To have any of those shift shakes the very foundations upon which Shiro has constructed his newborn sanity. In all the time that Shiro’s known him, Keith has never let himself have poor form. 

Until today.

_ Come back,  _ Shiro wants to say.  _ Come back to me. To bed. _

_ Ours. _

But his words turn to ice in his throat, and all he tastes is blood.

Keith walks out the door. He doesn’t look back. He slams the door behind himself, and the lock falls into place.

In his wake, the cold wind makes its way over to Shiro, sending rogue snowflakes to settle on his cheeks. Shiro squeezes his eyes shut against the chill. If he lies to himself, he can think that the wetness streaking down his face is just melting flakes of snow. Some joke that is. Some joke  _ he  _ is.

There aren’t any sounds to suggest whether or not Keith stays close. The storm steals all traces of him away. 

And Shiro’s alone.

Outside, the wind screams, but this time it sounds more like it’s laughing. It has Keith now, and Shiro can’t hope to do anything about it. 

The dim shadows stretch across the frosted metal floor. They obscure all the long-dried blood stains that’ve collected from their meals, turning them a more ominous sort of dark. They’re less innocuous when they’re like that, reminding Shiro of the violence that caused them. The violence that Keith committed, he reminds himself, because this is his work. He went out there and killed something to keep himself alive. To keep Shiro alive.

And now he’s out there again.

Alone.

What if the violence doesn’t go his way this time?

No. Shiro can’t allow himself to think about that. Can’t think of blood in the snow, or of suits torn to pieces. 

Maybe if he can-

Slowly, painfully, he lowers himself down from the bed. He slips on frost and lands hard on his good knee, but even that makes his vision go briefly white from the pain. It gets worse every day. This is surely some sort of punishment. He deserves this for what he’s done to hurt Keith’s heart. But still he drags himself onwards, using his stuttering robotic arm to pull his failing body across the floor, because he’ll be damned if he doesn’t at least try to do something. 

It takes effort, but he’s no stranger to exertion. He had to work twice as hard for the opportunities he got, and even then people doubted him. A task as simple as this is nothing. It’s nothing. Shiro puts one arm forward, and then the other, pulling himself into the main room and towards the fire. The snow from outside that blew in to replace Keith is a poor substitute as company; the melted bits near the fire shine like teardrops on the ground. Shiro’s scrabbling fingers burst through them and scatter the precious water further from the flames; it’ll be frozen again soon enough. No matter; there’s only one thing Shiro’s looking for. 

It’ll be next to the fire. 

That’s where Keith threw it. It was too many tally marks ago, back when Keith was angrier and there was a chance that they’d get out of this alive. Together.

Now he’s not so sure.

His wandering fingers find what he’s looking for, buried among the ashy remains of some of their burnt kindling. If it were his human hand and not the metal one, he’d worry about the heat of the flame, but there’s no time for caution. Shiro scrapes the crooked, tarnished metal of Keith’s discarded needle from the embers and cradles it in his palm.

When Keith comes back, Shiro might have to help sew up his suit. He’ll be ready. He’ll be ready.

If he can just fix it, bend it back into place, maybe it’ll be functional again. Maybe if he can just fix  _ one thing- _

It’s useless.

Shiro clenches the metal fist. It still has enough strength to crumple lesser ores like they’re paper, and the already crooked needle bends and cracks beneath the force of Shiro’s frustration. “Fuck,” he swears, and he drops the pieces to clink onto the ground. He falls back to sit on the ground, curling up with his knees up before the fire. He’s making a mess of everything. He can’t even fix the one thing that he needs to start fixing everything else. There’s no point in trying.

He squeezes his eyes shut against the threat of tears.

_ No. _

There’s nobody here to hear him, and the agony of holding his tears in far outweighs the familiar pain in his body.

So this time, this time, he cries.

It hurts. It  _ hurts,  _ and he’s not sure which pain is forcing the sobs from him, but they rip through him and leave him shivering on the floor. Each heave and choked-back scream aggravates some new level in the weeks-old ache that he’s come to know as his reality.

There’s nothing here for him. There’s nobody here for him.

It’s his fault.

Time’s passage doesn’t work right in this place. He’s not sure how long it takes for him to stop crying, but eventually the thunderstorm sobs turn into distant rumbles that rattle him just like his shivering does. He can’t repress these, though; these run far deeper than his skin and bones. 

He swipes a hand across his face in a half hearted attempt to chase the tear stains away. They’ll stay there for ages; he wouldn’t be surprised if they start to freeze there if he lets them. That would be a sight: frostbite on his cheeks, marking him at his lowest. If he stays by the fire, maybe the moisture will burn itself off and freeze somewhere else where it can’t hurt him anymore. These tears were supposed to take the pain out of his heart, not leave proof of it where everyone can see. 

“You’re fine,” he says aloud. “You’re fine.”

It doesn’t sound as convincing as when Keith used to say it.

It’s not worth it to dwell on that, though. It only pokes at the stinging hole in his heart. He needs to be practical. Needs to keep moving. He didn’t become captain of the Atlas for sitting around and mourning for his losses all the time. There’ll be time for that when he’s safe or when he’s dead, whichever comes first.

So the time passes, and the storm rages outside.

Nothing comes up on the comms.

Shiro gnaws on a cool, stringy piece of the snow beast that Keith brought in. They’re running low on cooked pieces. He’ll have to start another batch while he waits.

But he’ll have to move around the room to get to the frozen pieces, and he doesn’t think he can quite manage it. The thought alone makes him ache.

The pain radiates to his heart, where he’s already halfway to falling apart. The commitment to the rations is enough of a death sentence. They’re going to be here forever, and here are the meals to prove it. Here’s how they’ll draw out their inevitable frigid descent into doom.

They’re going to die here.

Or  _ he _ will, at least. Maybe Keith finally took his advice and went to just save himself. He’ll be better off.

Good for him.

He’s not sure he can even manage to put on his armor and helmet to follow. They’re sitting in a miserable pile near the foot of the bed, discarded ever since they stumbled in here. He could get the helmet on, sure, but there’s no way he could put the chestplate on without help. Even then, it probably wouldn’t help. He got torn to shreds with it on; maybe he would be better off just chasing Keith into the storm.

The idea spurs him into motion, and he grabs for something, anything, that will help him to his feet, and his arm finds the edge of a cabinet not too far away. That’ll make good leverage. Shiro latches his fingers onto it, focuses his strength, and tries to pull himself up. At least the fractures and the bad leg aren’t hindering him as badly as they’ve been doing lately, and he almost, almost gets himself to stand. But the connection to his arm flickers, and his vision flashes blue. In an undignified clatter, Shiro and his arm fall to the ground; the impact knocks the wind out of him, leaving no air for him to force out in a scream.  _ God,  _ it hurts.

So he’s trapped here, surrounded by cold metal walls.

This place isn’t a cell. It’s not.

He’s free from the Galra. Keith will take care of him.

Keith’s gone.

Maybe for good this time.

“I’m sorry,” he says to nothing and nobody. His head and heart are empty, and he’s pushed away the one person he had left. “I’m sorry.”

There’s no reply.

Shiro hangs his head and presses his hand to the stitched up, blood-caked side of his suit to try to put pressure on the gashes beneath. He’ll be able to hold out for a while longer. 

He can wait.

There are a few scraps of paper that he’d scattered when he fell. The puddles of melted snow have encroached on the edge of some of them, ruining the ink that’s lasted for countless years up until their arrival. It’s a shame, really; Shiro gathers them up and holds them closer to the fire to save them. At least they’ll maybe be legible if they’re dry. He squints at the symbols that’ve smudged and smeared across the page with the water. They don’t make any more sense than they did before he’d ruined them. This language still eludes him.

It’s hard to find a good story in the runes.

He gives in after three hours and tries his comms.

It’s a good thing the helmet isn’t a problem for him to put on, or he’d have no way of communicating. He manages to get it on and, to his surprise, it comes to life immediately. Despite the cold, it’s stayed powered up, probably since Shiro hasn’t used it for ages. He breathes in, breathes out. Tries to compose himself. 

“Um. Keith.”

Bad start.

“Keith, come in. You’ve been out there for too long. If you got Black running, that’s great, and I-” He stops.

Keith could have already left. If he got Black to wake up or he managed to send a signal out to the Atlas, he could be rescued already or any minute now. 

Shiro clears his throat, says, “Sorry. Over.”

He takes off the helmet and sets it down at his side.

Silence.

Static.

Silence.

It figures. Of course Keith wouldn’t reply.

It was worth a try, he supposes.

_ “Shiro-” _

The line crackles and glitches; the harsh sound of it makes Shiro wince. His heart stutters and leaps, though, and he scrambles to pick up his helmet once more and answer the call. “Keith?” he tries, trying to fit the helmet onto his head and reach the microphone. “Keith, come in!”

_ “-ro-” _

At least it’s better than static. At least it’s better than silence.

He tries again. “Keith?”

_ “Open the door - please -” _

He cuts out again.

The door. The  _ door.  _ He’s right outside. 

Did he ever really leave?

Shiro half-scrambles to his feet and forces himself across the room on his unsteady legs. There’s no time for caution. “Keith!” he yells on an exhale, reaching for the handle for the door. He fumbles at the too-cold latch. He hasn’t been this close to the winter in ages.

It’s not budging. Some ice must have gotten caught in the inner workings. The metal shrieks when he tries to force it to move, as if it has the right to keep Shiro from getting to Keith.

“Come  _ on!”  _ Shiro snarls, and he wrenches the latch down with all the force he has.

The storm blows the door open, howling for tribute.

Keith tumbles in with the snow.

He must have been waiting right up against the door for however long he’s been here. He’s curled up as small as possible, all armor and angles. Shiro uses the last of his strength to drag him through the door and slam it behind them, plunging them back into firelit dimness. Keith’s covered in snow - caked with it, really - and Shiro starts brushing as much of it off as he can. The chill, he knows, will run skin-deep before long. With how long Keith’s been out there, it’s surely set in already. The paladin suits are good, but not this good. Not good enough to keep him safe.

Shiro should have kept him safe. Should have, didn’t-

“Off. Get this off. Let me check on you.” He fumbles for the release on Keith’s helmet - his fingers have long since forgotten what it’s like to be a paladin - and takes it off. He throws it to the side, ignoring the clatter. Nothing matters but Keith. He’s dangerously pale, so much so that the dark fall of his hair seems too black, too unambiguous. Shiro has always operated in the gray areas of the world, but right now Keith seems dangerously close to the absolute finality of something Shiro doesn’t want to name.

Weakly, Keith rasps, “Shiro, I-”

“Not a word, Keith.” Shiro starts taking off the exterior plating of the armor; it goes somewhere he doesn’t care about. Chestplate. Gauntlets. Greaves. Was Keith always so skinny in just the undersuit? “Can you feel your toes? Fingers?”

“Yeah, but I-”

“No.”

“Shiro…”

“That was the dumbest thing you’ve ever done,” Shiro tells him, and he’s shocked that he hasn’t started yelling yet. “Keith, you could have gotten yourself killed!”

“Had to try to get a signal out,” Keith says softly, hunching in on himself. “Had to get us out of here.”

Shiro tries to control his breathing; tries to hold back the rising threat of a sob. “Keith, you were out there for too long.”

“Door wouldn’t open.” This time, Keith’s voice is hardly above a whisper. “Couldn’t get in.”

“You were-” Shiro nearly chokes. The whisper comes out of his chest past the vice of  _ no no no -  _ “You were right outside?” 

“Sitting. She wouldn’t wake up, so I came back.” Keith shakes his head, scattering ice crystals across the floor.

Keith could have died. Keith could have frozen to death, curled up on the other side of the door, and Shiro would never have known. The panic of the realization spurs him into action, and he holds out his arm for Keith to cling to. “C’mon, get off the floor, Keith. It’s freezing down there.”

The strain of helping him up tugs at the skin around his injury in all the worst ways. Shiro gasps and works through the pain. It’s not worth it to pretend anymore. Keith is in trouble. Nothing matters but this.

The frigid fingers that dig into his arm are tipped with claws. Shiro winces and stares, and that’s when he notices that as pale as Keith is, he’s cast in a purple that has nothing to do with the light. No illusion is responsible for this. It’s just-

“You changed.”

Keith nods, and when his teeth chatter again, it’s easy to see how much sharper they are. “Keeps me warmer,” he murmurs. “A bit.”

“Keith,” Shiro says, and it takes all of his strength to not sob. Keith was so close to dying. Shiro would have lost him. He could have lost him.

He wraps his arms around Keith, holding him in the tightest embrace he’s ever given, and he tries not to cry.

“Shiro,” Keith says, a little brokenly, but his claws are digging into Shiro’s back with a reckless desperation.

“Come to bed.” He’ll beg if he has to. “Keith, let me take care of you. You’re in horrible shape. You’re half frozen to death.”

“You’re more-” Keith’s protest dissolves into a low, shuddering groan. It’s like he doesn’t have the energy to cough.

Shiro shushes him. Nothing is more important than warming Keith up right now. If one of them is going to survive this place, it has to be Keith. He won’t let him die here. Keith was never meant to go quietly. Shiro has never meant to outlive him.

He coughs, and the motion only serves to make his wound scream in protest. Shiro pointedly ignores the iron taste at the back of his throat and instead rasps, “See? I’m freezing. So are you.”

Keith shakes his head again. “Shiro-”

“No.” He won’t let Keith keep sacrificing himself. “No. Come here. We’ll warm each other up.”

It sounds like Keith might fight him on it. He expects it, expects the fight, almost wants Keith’s fire to come out if that means it’ll keep them both warm. But instead Keith slumps, murmurs a soft assent, and lets Shiro hobble towards the bedroom with him in his arms. He’s heavy, packed with muscle that hides well on him, but still lighter than Shiro knows he usually is. He’s had Keith’s full weight on top of him during a spar, and he would know it anywhere - now, even with armor, Keith’s far too light. Their time in the eternal twilight of the storm has taken every spare ounce from him, and more. Too frail. Too cold.

Each step borders on agonizing, but Shiro grits his teeth and forces himself onwards, bringing Keith into the bedroom where the light is dimmer and the walls are closer around them. He pushes Keith down into the bed first, crowding him towards the wall where he’ll be safe. Keith curls in on himself almost immediately with a quiet, low whine. Even standing above him, Shiro can see the full-body tremors that wrack his body. Keith hasn’t looked this small in years. Ever, even. At least when he’d been a small kid he’d been ready to fight; this time, all of Keith’s fire is hidden, quenched by the storm that drank up all of his life in exchange for...what?

What has this storm given them but pain?

Shiro carefully climbs into the bed after Keith, pulling all of the blankets up and over them both. He tucks them around Keith as much as he can manage, biting back little sounds of pain that threaten to come loose. He wraps his arms around Keith like Keith’s done for him for endless nights, pressing himself up against Keith’s back to cover as much as him as possible. He’s happy for once that he’s bigger than Keith, and closes his eyes for a moment, focusing on the soft  _ thrum  _ of Keith’s heartbeat, palpable where they’re connected.

He’s alive.

He rubs Keith’s arms, trying to use friction to build up heat again. The whole time, Keith shudders against him, teeth chattering together around what might be Shiro’s name. That’s good; surely his body is still trying. Shiro’s willing to try too. He has to.

Keith has to live.

He reached back and takes Shiro’s hand, holding him with shivering fingers, and makes it thread through his hair. “Please,” he whispers, and Shiro obeys. Anything for Keith. Anything, anything.

The clawed tips of Keith’s fingers dig into his skin a little bit, but Shiro breathes through the pinprick pain. A little bit extra is nothing; he lets Keith guide his hand through icy black strands of hair.

Keith’s controlling the movement. He’s doing this. Not Shiro.

But Shiro-

He’s not going to stop him.

Shiro’s fingers smooth their way past tufted ears. They twitch beneath his touch - sensitive, maybe - and Shiro is immediately curious.

“Soft.”

“Mm.” Keith pushes his head into Shiro’s hand. “Cold.”

He’s right; the tips of the ears are damp with melted snow. Shiro returns to them over and over. He tries his best to chase the cool water from the fur there and bring the blood flowing back there. The ears twitch beneath his fingers a few times, but Keith doesn’t stop him, so Shiro takes it as a good sign. Besides, he likes the texture. And Keith must like the way this is going, because he makes a contented humming sound that’s far too quiet to be made with a voice. It comes from his chest, surely, but Shiro can’t figure out how he could possibly be doing it. Regardless, it fills him with a comfortable warmth, and he smiles despite himself. 

“Feeling any better?” he asks.

Keith presses his head into Shiro’s hand. “Better,” he whispers. “Was so cold.”

“You took too much of a risk.”

“Wasn’t too much.” There’s Keith’s defiance, creeping through and heating his words even as Shiro tries to bring life back to his ears. “I lived, didn’t I?”

“Barely.” Barely. Barely. He almost lost Keith.

“That’s not the point.”

I made you go out there,” Shiro says into the near-darkness of the room. Outside, the wind howls and roars for their lives as payment to the storm, but Shiro’s not about to give Keith up to anything. Not now. Not ever. “I said-“

“I know what you said.” Keith pushes back into Shiro’s grip with a little more force. It might be spite. Shiro hopes it’s not.

But he knows what he said. Knows he did the wrong thing.

He stumbles over the words and blames the cold for stealing his control over himself. “If you’d died out there, after everything, I would never have-”

Would never have forgiven himself.

Would never have stopped calling out to Keith on staticky comms.

Would never have tried to get help, because rescue would only prolong his existence in a reality where he was responsible for Keith’s death.

“God, I’m sorry,” he chokes out. “I’m so sorry.”

Keith shudders in his grip and murmurs, “I know.”

And then, softer, nearly lost to the furious wind outside-

“I’m glad I’m back.”

Shiro buries his face in the back of Keith’s neck, lips brushing a trembling shoulder, and whispers, “I’m glad you’re here, Keith.”

He holds Keith as close as he can manage, and he hopes that will be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> the rest is soon to come :)
> 
> find me on twitter [here!](http://www.twitter.com/_triplehelix_)


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